BOSTON UNIVERSITY

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

Dissertation

REVILING AND REVERING THE MORMONS:

DEFINING AMERICAN VALUES, 1890-2008

by

CRISTINE HUTCHISON-JONES

B.A., Florida State University, 2001

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

2011
 UMI Number: 3483454

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© Copyright by
CRISTINE HUTCHISON-JONES
2011
 Approved by

First Reader
Stephen Prothero, PhD
Professor of Religion, Boston University

Second Reader
Roberts, PhD
Tomorrow Foundation Professor of History, Boston University

Third Reader
Terryl Givens, PI
Professor of Literature and Religion, University of Richmond
 Acknowledgments

Every dissertation is a collaborative project, as everyone who has struggled to

write one knows well. I owe thanks to far more people than I can name here.

Dr. Leo Sandon, my undergraduate advisor in American and Florida Studies and

Religion at Florida State University, took me under his wing and showed me that

however impractical it may seem, you can make a career out of studying the humanities

and make academic work meaningful beyond the academy. Dr. Sandon was the first

person to suggest I consider graduate school, and he has convinced me over and over

again in the last fifteen years that I could do it.

During my years as a graduate student at Boston University I have been lucky to

get to know many of the faculty in the Department of Religion, all of whom have been

consistently generous with their time, their advice, and their support. I owe special thanks

on this front to Kecia Ali, Deeana Copeland Klepper, and Christopher I. Lehrich.

Professor Peter S. Hawkins, who served as the Director of the Luce Program in Scripture

and the Arts at Boston University from 2000 to 2008, was a wonderful boss and an even

better mentor and friend. In the last ten years I have benefitted from Peter's example, his

insightful editorial assistance, and most of all his generous counsel.

An academic institution is only as good as the faculty and staff who provide the

administrative support that keeps everything running. The administration and staff in the

College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program, especially Joseph Bizup and Chris Walsh,

have helped me figure out how to balance the demands of teaching and research. The

staff in the Department of Religion and the Division of Religious and Theological Studies

iv
have helped me cross my Ts, dot my Is, gather all necessary signatures, and get every

form in on time. I also owe an enormous debt to the staff in the Interlibrary Loan

Department, who somehow managed to locate every obscure text and film I requested. I

also received generous financial support from the Division of Religious and Theological

Studies, the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program, and the Boston University

Women's Guild.

During the dissertation process Professor Stephen Prothero of the Department of

Religion and Professor Jon Roberts of the Department of History, both at Boston

University, have patiently talked out ideas and worked through drafts, always with an eye

to making this a better dissertation and a stronger piece of scholarship. Professor Terryl

Givens of the English Department at the University of Richmond has been just as

supportive, sending ideas, feedback, and general encouragement from a distance. My

student colleagues have also provided various kinds of much-needed support. The

members of the dissertation group in the Boston University Department of History

welcomed me into their midst during the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 academic years. My

student colleagues in the Division of Religious and Theological Studies patiently talked

out ideas about teaching and research with me, and generally shared in the highs and lows

of this process. I owe special thanks to Ingrid Anderson, Patton Dodd, and Sarah

Fredericks for endless brainstorming, last-minute proofreading, and, most importantly,

amazing pep talks.

Finally, I share my accomplishments during my graduate career with all of my

family and friends, but the lion's share of the credit must go to my husband, Chris

v
Hutchison-Jones. He has cheerfully helped me bear all of the burdens of my PhD

program from picking up the slack around the house to proofreading pages of my

dissertation, even while pursuing a graduate degree of his own. I look forward to

discovering the wonderful ways we will be able to spend our time together after

graduation.

vi
 REVILING AND REVERING THE MORMONS:

DEFINING AMERICAN VALUES, 1890-2008

(Order No. )

CRISTINE HUTCHISON-JONES

Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2011

Major Professor: Stephen Prothero, Professor of Religion

ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines images of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day

Saints and its members, the Mormons, in American culture between 1890 and 2008. The

Mormons were doubtless the target of significant religious bigotry in nineteenth-century

America, but scholars have generally held that this intolerance softened after the Church

Americanized in the 1890s, primarily by ending Church-sanctioned plural marriage. But

while scholars see Mormonism as quintessentially American, non-Mormon Americans

continue to view it as inherently un-American. This dissertation argues that negative

stereotypes of the Mormons persisted in American culture into the twenty-first century,

as evidenced by the anti-Mormon rhetoric that beset Mormon Mitt Romney's 2008

presidential campaign. Between 1890 and 2008, non-Mormon Americans represented

Mormon religion as fraudulent, foolish, and dangerous and criticized the Mormons'

intermingling of faith with politics, business, and sexual mores. American praise for

Mormons has remained limited to those events and areas in which Mormons separated

their peculiar religious beliefs from their day-to-day actions.

vii
 This dissertation draws on a variety of primary sources, including works of

history, newspaper articles, novels, television shows, and movies, to analyze and compare

depictions of Mormons in the context of historical developments in the Church and

American society. It identifies five major categories into which images of the Mormons

have fallen during the last 120 years. First, negative representations of Mormonism

emphasize the falsehood of belief in ongoing revelation, accusing Church leaders of

manufacturing so-called revelations to manipulate their credulous followers. Second,

Mormon sexual mores including polygamy and the Church's supposed patriarchal

oppression of women and homosexuals have come under fire. Third, the Mormon

assertion that their Church is the only true religion has combined with popular

perceptions of doctrines such as blood atonement to produce stereotypes of Mormonism

as inherently violent. Fourth, the Mormons' practice of integrating religious beliefs into

politics, economy, and society has fostered accusations of the un-American mingling of

church and state. But, finally, Americans have praised Mormonism at moments when

Mormons have largely set aside their religion while contributing to national projects,

celebrating their role in Manifest Destiny, World Wars I-II, and the Cold War.

viii
 Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter One In the Beginning: Mormonism and Representations of the

Mormons, 1820-1890 14

Chapter Two Frontiers: Mormonism on the Edges of American Culture,

1890-1917 56

Chapter Three Making Peace?: Moderating Stereotypes, 1917-1942 116

Chapter Four Protestant, Catholic, Jew... Mormon?: Mormons on the Edge of 172
the Mainstream, 1942-1966

Chapter Five "A Firm and Immoveable Faith": Mormons Not Moving with the 223
Times, 1966-1993

Chapter Six Searching for Middle Ground: Imagining Mormons As Real 282

People, 1993-2008

Bibliography 333

CV 353

ix
 1

Introduction

Americans have long prided themselves on the religious diversity of the United

States; indeed tolerance for that diversity is one of the nation's prized public values.

Recent research from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life shows an ever-growing

mix of religions in the United States, and recent scholarship affirms that this has always

been a nation of various beliefs.1 Yet interaction among different religious communities

in the United States often has been marked by conflict. Historically, minority religions

begin their American experience as reviled others, go on to negotiate how to be

religiously distinctive but also truly American, and often achieve some degree of

assimilation with mainstream American culture and the Protestant values that define it.

Some scholars have explored specific incidents of religious violence or movements of

religious intolerance, but the historical shift by which outsider religions can

accommodate, assimilate or take a place in the mainstream culture—a process often

characterized by both growing acceptance and lingering suspicion of the minority

group—remains largely unexplored.

The examination of American representations of minority religious communities

highlights the ongoing problem of religious intolerance in the United States. But more

than that, it highlights the religious beliefs and behaviors that a majority of Americans

accept as conforming to and confirming American ideals or reject as undermining the

nation's most essential values. As the Protestant mainstream has struggled to define a
1
Neela Banerjee, "Poll Finds a Fluid Religious Life in U.S.," New York Times (Feb. 26, 2008). On
America's historical religious diversity, see Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the
American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) and William R. Hutchison, Religious
Pluralism in America: the Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2003).
 2

national identity for the United States, representations of Mormonism have held a mirror

up to dominant cultural anxieties about the place of religion in the public sphere and in

day-to-day life, and the proper balance between individual freedom and the common

good.

Numerous religious groups have undergone a shift from the cultural margins

toward the center in the United States, including Jews, Roman Catholics, and various

Asian traditions. Many scholars argue that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

and its adherents, popularly known as the Mormons, have also "Americanized." Often

identified as the truly American religion, Mormonism is certainly the most successful of

this nation's native-born new religious movements. During the course of the twentieth

century, Mormons have by some accounts made the journey from reviled outsiders—

geographical, political, and social as well as religious—to a community that is

quintessential^ American.4 Nonetheless while Mormons definitely occupy a more

comfortable position in American culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century than

2
See Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890 -
1930 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Gustive O. Larson, The "Americanization" of Utah
for Statehood (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1971); and Armand L. Mauss, The Angel and the
Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
3
Since it was founded in 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has grown to
include a reported thirteen million members worldwide. Some studies predict that the Church will have 250
million members before the end of the twenty-first century (Rodney Stark, The Rise of Mormonism, edited
by Reid L. Neilson [New York: Columbia University Press, 2005]); Mormons remain a small community
on the American religious landscape, but such religious minorities hold a central place in American history.
In Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), R.
Laurence Moore argued that minority religious communities have been essential to shaping America's
mainstream culture through their strenuous efforts to define themselves against that mainstream. Moore
names the Mormons as aprimary example of this process in the first essay in his book, "How to Become a
Religious People: the Mormon Example," 25^17.
4
See Terryl Givens, The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3-12, and Moore, "How to Become a Religious People," in
Religious Outsiders. Moore's essay began with a remark by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy that Mormons
teach "the American religion" (25).
they did one hundred years ago, their shift toward acceptance is far from complete. Many

non-Mormon Americans continue to view the Latter-day Saints through the lens of

prevalent stereotypes, rooted in the nineteenth century, about their religious, sexual, and

social behaviors. In many respects, Mormons remain the nation's premier religious

outsiders.

While many scholars and foreign observers see Mormonism as quintessentially

American, many non-Mormon Americans continue to view the religion as inherently un-

American. This dissertation examines images of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day

Saints and its members, the Mormons, produced in the United States between 1890 and

2008 and argues that negative stereotypes of the Mormons persisted in American culture

into the twenty-first century. Between 1890 and 2008, non-Mormon Americans

represented Mormon religion as fraudulent, foolish, and dangerous and criticized the

Mormons' intrusion of religion into the political, economic, and social spheres. While

Americans celebrated the Mormons' nineteenth-century pioneer achievements and their

patriotic devotion to the United States in the twentieth century, praise for Mormons has

remained limited to those events and areas in which they have separated their peculiar

religious beliefs from their day-to-day actions. Both negative and positive non-Mormon

representations of the Latter-day Saints demonstrate popular American understandings,

reinforced by both mainstream Protestant values and American democratic ideals, of the

proper separation of religion from not only politics but also business and day-to-day

social behavior. Further, images of the Saints illustrate the general American estimation

of individual freedom as the nation's most prized ideal.

 4

The history of religions is a history of contact, conflict, and combination.5 This is

particularly true in the United States, where disestablishment, religious creativity, and the

constant influx of immigrants have resulted in one of the world's most religiously diverse

nations. Americans have struggled to define a unified national identity in the face of their

unprecedented political, ethnic, and religious diversity, and numerically and culturally

dominant mainline Protestants have generally guided the discussion. The virtual merger

of mainline Protestant values and American democratic ideals in nineteenth-century

politics and society set the stage for vigorous anti-Catholic and anti-Mormon movements

that attacked those religions' beliefs in ongoing communication between God and

humanity, peculiar sexual practices (Catholic celibacy and Mormon polygamy), and

comingling of religion and this-worldly concerns.6 By the end of the nineteenth century,

both the Roman Catholics and the Mormons had apparently capitulated to political and

social pressure and begun to Americanize. During the twentieth century American

Catholics set an example for how to join the mainstream, increasingly deemphasized the

religious beliefs and behaviors that distinguished them from the Protestant mainstream,

culminating in reforms instituted in the Catholic Church by the Second Vatican Council

5
For more on the issue of religious contact in the United States see Catherine Albanese,
"Introduction," America: Religions and Religion, 3 rd edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1999),
1-22; and Catherine Albanese, "Exchanging Selves, Exchanging Souls: Contact, Combination, and
American Religious History," in Thomas Tweed, ed., Retelling American Religious History (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997), esp. 223-24.
6
On Protestantism's powerful role in nineteenth-century American government and society, see
William R. Hutchison, Between the Times; Robert T. Handy, The Protestant Quest for a Christian America,
1830-1930 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967); and R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion
in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). The classic treatment of
nineteenth-century religious intolerance as an effort to define American identity is David Brion Davis,
"Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: an Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon
Literature," The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47', no. 2 (Sep., 1960): 105-224.
in the 1960s. But the Latter-day Saints, who began the century with numerous changes

that brought their practices more in line with American norms, nevertheless maintained

their peculiar system of belief and, at the end of the twentieth century, began to publicly

reemphasize their differences from the rest of Americans.8

1890 was a pivotal year in Mormon history, when Church Prophet and President

Wilford Woodruff delivered the Manifesto ending the practice of polygamy (in word if

not in deed); severed the Church's ties to the Utah schools and economy; and disbanded

the Church's political party. These are pivotal events in the history of the relationship

between the Latter-day Saints and non-Mormon America; they brought the Church into

conformity with federal law and paved the way for the predominantly Mormon territory

of Utah to enter the union as a state in 1896. Many historians date the beginning of

Mormon Americanization to this period, when the Church shifted its social, political, and

economic practices toward the norms accepted by wider American society.

While scholars have examined incidents and images of anti-Mormon intolerance

throughout the nineteenth century, there is virtually no systematic or in-depth scholarship

on images of Mormonism in the United States after World War I. In The Viper on the

Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (1997), religion and literature

scholar Terryl Givens examined representations of Mormons in nineteenth-century

popular literature, much of which was fiction masquerading as memoir or history.

7
See Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, with an
introduction by Martin E. Marty (New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1960; Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1983), and John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 2003).
8
In The Angel and the Beehive, Armand Mauss described the Saints' new emphasis on their
differences from other Americans as "retrenchment." See esp. "Part 3: Coping with Assimilation and
Respectability," 77-214.
Focusing on representations of Mormon theology and plural marriage, Givens described

how these aspects of Mormon life challenged "the construction of collective identity" in

the United States.9 While he briefly examined the recurrence of nineteenth-century anti-

Mormon tropes in the late twentieth century, he did not do so systematically. Further,

Givens' study did not include positive representations of the community that increased in

American culture after World War I. As a result he did not address the increasing

ambivalence and ambiguity of the relationship between non-Mormon Americans and the

Latter-day Saints.

In The Politics of American Religious Identity: the Seating of Senator Reed

Smoot, Mormon Apostle (2003), Kathleen Flake examined the political controversy over

the seating of the first Mormon elected to the United States Senate, which lasted from

Smoot's election in 1902 until Congress finally decided not to expel him in 1907. Flake

argued convincingly that while on the surface the main issue was the suspected

persistence of Mormon polygamy in the early twentieth century more than a decade after

the Church officially called for an end to the practice, in fact Americans were concerned

that Smoot could not be politically independent of his Church. The decision to seat

Smoot, then, was a sign that the nation had accepted the Church's claims that it had

ended polygamy and that it did not control individual members' political behavior.

Though Flake stated that the Smoot case signaled a substantial weakening of Protestant

hegemony in the United States and claimed that anti-Mormonism was a forgotten relic at

9
Givens, Viper, 5.
 7

the beginning of the twenty-first century, she did not examine American images of

Mormonism after the Smoot hearings or otherwise support these assertions.10

Sociologist Armand Mauss's The Angel and the Beehive: the Mormon Struggle

with Assimilation examined Mormonism well into the twentieth century. His focus was

not, however, on non-Mormon Americans' responses to the Latter-day Saints, but on the

ways in which Mormonism itself responded to the wider culture. Mauss traced Church

teachings and practices first through a phase of Americanization (1880-1960), and then a

later retrenchment (after 1960) that entailed a return to distinctly Mormon beliefs and

self-consciously set the community apart from mainstream American culture. But while

Mauss's research suggested the high degree to which Latter-day Saints have been aware

of and responsive to the opinions of non-Mormon Americans with regard to the Church,

his focus was entirely on activities and changes within the Church organization. He had

little to say about American culture's responses as the Mormons moved from one "stage"

or one stance toward to the mainstream culture to another.

Jan Shipps' essay "From Satyr to Saint: American Perceptions of the Mormons,

1860-1960" has long been the most sustained treatment of American representations of

Mormonism.11 First delivered as a paper to the Mormon Historical Association in 1973, it

has been cited in the last thirty-five years by virtually every important scholar of the

Latter-day Saints. Nonetheless this paper, which was finally published in 2000, tells us

remarkably little about the content of the perceptions that Shipps surveyed. Instead, she

10
Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: the Seating of Senator Reed Smoot,
Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
11
Jan Shipps, "From Satyr to Saint: American Perceptions of the Mormons, 1860-1960,"
Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 2000), 51-97.
 8

provided a statistical analysis of references to Mormonism in American magazine articles

published between 1860 and 1960. According to Shipps, during the one hundred years

she covered non-Mormon Americans were focused on Mormon theology polygamy, as

well as the perceived political, economic, and social control that the Church exercised

over its members. But Shipps did not give in-depth descriptions of the ways in which

Americans expressed their interest in and concern about these aspects of Mormonism,

instead merely indicating that images of the Saints grew increasingly positive during this

time period.

In a follow-up essay, also published in 2000, Shipps went on to explore

perceptions of the Mormons from 1960 to the end of the twentieth century. She made it

clear, however, that the essay was meant to be suggestive rather than a sustained

discussion. Here she did more to describe the content of the representations of Latter-day

Saints that she surveyed, briefly examining the most prominent recent examples of

images of the Mormons in the United States and focusing not on magazines, but on

television, radio, and books. The primary value of this piece is that Shipps described and

provided clear examples of some of the recurring themes and images used to depict

Mormons, from the squeaky clean all-American patriot to the tyrannical patriarch.

This dissertation draws on a wide variety of primary sources, including works of history,

newspaper articles, novels, television shows, and movies, to analyze and compare

Shipps, "Surveying the Mormon Image since 1960," in Sojourner in the Promised Land, 98-
123.
 9

depictions of Mormons in the context of historical developments in the Church and

American society.

Building on Jan Shipps' work, it identifies five major categories into which

images of the Mormons have fallen during the last 120 years. First, negative

representations of Mormonism have emphasized the falsehood of belief in ongoing

revelation, accusing Church leaders of manufacturing so-called revelations to manipulate

their credulous followers. Second, Mormon proscription on sexual mores come under

fire. Polygamy has always been the primary object of attacks on Mormon sexual

behavior, but after the middle of the twentieth century the Church's supposed patriarchal

oppression of women and homosexuals received increasingly negative attention. Third,

the Mormon assertion that their Church is the only true religion combined with popular

perceptions of doctrines such as blood atonement to produce stereotypes of Mormonism

as inherently violent. Fourth, rather than separating images of the Church's supposed

control over members into three distinct categories, as Shipps did, this dissertation

examines the Mormons' practice of integrating religious beliefs into politics, economy,

and society alongside one another under the category of theocracy. The Mormons'

practice of intermingling religion in day-to-day affairs fostered accusations of the un-

American breach of the separation of church and state, sometimes leading to allegations

that the Saints have never given up their nineteenth-century dreams of a theocratic

empire. Finally, positive images fall under the heading of "American Mormons." In

keeping with the prevalent negative stereotypes' criticisms of Mormon religious beliefs

and the intrusion of those beliefs into the public sphere, Americans have praised
 10

Mormons for moments when they have largely set aside their religion while contributing

to national projects, celebrating the Saints' role in Manifest Destiny, the World Wars, and

the Cold War.

Each stereotype, negative and positive, demonstrates how non-Mormon

Americans have generally been represented in very black and white terms. Further, non-

Mormon Americans have routinely treated isolated parts of Mormonism and treated them

as if they were the whole of the tradition. Thus a few individuals or isolated events have

been viewed as representative of the totality of the Mormon community and its history.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, few sources examined both positive and

negative aspects of Mormonism side-by-side; the preponderance of sources treated the

Saints as either wholly wrong or bad, or entirely good and therefore truly "American."

Chapter 1 deals with the history of Mormonism and Mormon interactions with

non-Mormon Americans in the nineteenth century. This chapter provides background for

understanding the historical basis for many of the claims made about Mormon belief,

practice, and history during the twentieth century. In addition, it briefly examines some

examples of nineteenth-century depictions of the Latter-day Saints to show how

Americans imagined their Mormon neighbors leading up to 1890.

Chapter 2 examines representations of the Mormons betweenl890 and 1917.

Starting with the beginning of Mormon Americanization in the form of the Manifesto

ending polygamy, it traces American images of the Saints up to the beginning of World

War I. For much of the period these images were little changed from those popular before

1890, emphasizing negative stereotypes that depicted Mormons not simply as deviant but
 11

dangerous. After 1912, however, Americans began to put more emphasis on the positive

"American Mormon" image. This shift was spurred in part by the increasing evidence

that polygamy was, in fact, a dying practice among the Saints more than twenty years

after the Manifesto. But it was also a response to the Mexican revolution (1910-1920),

during which Mexican revolutionaries launched repeated attacks against American

colonists in northern Mexico. Many of these colonists were Latter-day Saints and, despite

the fact that many were also practicing polygamists, Americans united in support of these

"American Mormons" in the face of a common foreign enemy.

Chapter 3 covers the period from 1917 to 1942, beginning with World War I and

ending with the United States' entry into World War II. The nation confronted a number

of major challenges during this period, and in the face of World War I, the Great

Depression, and World War II, Americans emphasized unity over difference. Thus while

negative stereotypes about the Mormons persisted in this period, they largely disappeared

from the national media and Hollywood films. Those sources focused instead on

celebrations of the Mormon pioneers and the contemporary Saints' contributions to both

wars and to the nation's economic recovery. Significant amounts of popular fiction and

nonfiction continued to link the Saints with negative stereotypes, but overall the negative

images no longer pictured the Saints as an imminent threat either to national or individual

security during these years.

Chapter 4 explores the postwar period from 1942 until 1966. Throughout World

War II and in the early years of the Cold War, the national news media and Hollywood

continued to focus on positive images of the Mormons. But negative stereotypes were
 12

still widely used in popular and scholarly books. Negative images began to creep back

into newspapers and films in the 1960s, as the Mormons became firmly associated with

conservative American values and thus drew the criticism of writers and filmmakers with

more progressive agendas on issues of race and gender. Negative images returned to the

fore in the national media at the end of 1965 when Michigan Governor George Romney

ran for the Republican presidential nomination, prompting renewed warnings of the

Church's political influence with members and reminders of the conservative values that

dominated the Church in direct contradiction to liberalizing trends in American society.

Chapter 5 examines the period from 1966 to 1993 when the culture war came to

full flower in the United States. The Mormons had long been largely Republican as a

group, and several prominent Saints, including George Romney, served in national

political positions under Republican Presidents during this period. Furthermore, the

retrenchment phase that began within the Church in the 1960s highlighted peculiar

Mormon beliefs and practices and emphasized conservative values and the close

relationship between faith and politics in Mormonism, aligning the Mormons in the

popular mind with conservative evangelical Christian political movements like the Moral

Majority. Negative stereotypes flourished in this period, and the positive "American

Mormon" image split as conservative and liberal Americans celebrated those aspects of

Mormonism that reflected their own divergent values. By 1993, news stories, books,

television programs, and films that featured Mormons were dominated by negative

images of the Mormons, and liberal critiques of the Saints came into their own.
 13

Chapter 6 covers the final years of this study, from 1993 to 2008. During this

period, the split between conservative and liberal appraisals of the Saints continued.

Conservatives generally praised the Mormons' social and political conservatism while

denigrating their religious beliefs, a perspective reflected in Republican presidential

candidate Mitt Romney's trouble with Republican primary voters. Liberal voices

celebrated Mormon religion as an example of American pluralism and an object of

religious tolerance while at the same time attacking the Mormons' intermingling of their

conservative faith with their political and social behavior. The "American Mormon"

image also shifted once again. While in some ways positive images of the Mormons

remained split between conservatives and liberals as in the previous period, at the

beginning of the twenty-first century a small but growing number of observers

represented Mormons as complicated people and their Church as a community of diverse

individuals rather than a hegemonic group. While the increase in images that treated the

Mormons not as stereotypes but as real people hints at increasing acceptance, one-

dimensional and mostly negative stereotypes continued to dominate American

conversations about the Latter-day Saints.

According to a 2007 poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 25% of
likely Republican voters said they were less likely to vote for a candidate who was Mormon. Among white
evangelical Protestant voters, that number jumped to 36%. See Scott Keeter, "Public Opinion about
Mormons: Mitt Romney Discusses His Religion," PewResearchCenter Publications, December 4,2007.
Available online at http://pewresearch.org.
 14

Chapter 1

In the Beginning: Mormonism and Representations of the Mormons, 1820-1890

According to Joseph Smith, he spoke to God for the first time in 1820, when he

was only fourteen years old. Smith and his followers later looked upon this First Vision

as the beginning of a prophetic career that would lead to the organization of America's

most successful and most beleaguered homegrown religion. The uneducated son of a

poor New England farmer, during his short life Smith published the Book of Mormon,

founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and led his ever-increasing

community of followers on a westward journey from New York and Pennsylvania to

Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, where he was murdered at the hands of an angry mob in

1844. In spite of the loss of their leader, the community of Latter-day Saints, under the

leadership of the hierarchy that Smith had established, survived another removal, this

time to the barren, uninhabited deserts of the intermountain West. There, improbably, the

Mormons thrived, making the desert "bloom as the rose" and gathering followers from

throughout the United States and northern Europe. When the Mormon Kingdom in the

West was granted statehood in 1896 as the present-day state of Utah, what had begun as a

group of thirty of Smith's family members and neighbors had grown to include nearly

200,000 followers. By 2008, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints claimed over

thirteen million members worldwide with more than six million of those living in the

United States. It has become routine for observers to cite sociologist Rodney Stark's
 15

prediction that the religion popularly referred to as Mormonism will become the next

great world religion.1

In spite of or perhaps because of its phenomenal and nearly unprecedented

success, Mormonism has faced extraordinary opposition from non-Mormon Americans

throughout its relatively short history. From the community's earliest days, before Joseph

Smith had published the Book of Mormon in 1829 or incorporated the Church in 1830,

non-Mormons have criticized Smith as a con artist, a madman, or both, and his followers

as ignorant dupes. These criticisms exploded after Smith's death when in 1852, after their

final exodus west, the Church hierarchy announced to the world that God had, through

his prophet Smith, reestablished the biblical practice of plural marriage. This combined

with the Latter-day Saint beliefs in continuing revelation, the right of their Church's

hierarchy to direct the social, political, and economic organization of the community, and

the Saints' evident desire to separate themselves from the United States, spurred decades

of anti-Mormon feeling among Americans, widely expressed in anti-Mormon literature

that purported to reveal the fraudulent and immoral nature of Latter-day Saint religion.

American outrage was so strong against the Mormons' peculiar religious beliefs and the

power that their Church held in the lives of individual Saints that the federal government

eventually seized the Church's property and assets and threatened to disenfranchise

Mormon voters if the Church persisted in controlling the Utah territory and supporting

1
Rodney T. Stark, "The Rise of a New World Faith," Review of Religious Research 26, no. 1,
Special Issue Co-Sponsored by the Society for the Sociological Study of Mormon Life and the Family and
Demographic Institute of Brigham Young University (Sep. 1984), 18-27. Reprinted in Stark and Reid
Larkin Neilson, The Rise of Mormonism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). See also Jan
Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,
1987). Both Stark and Shipps are non-Mormon.
 16

the practice of polygamy. Under the sustained pressures of public opinion and

government action, Church President and Prophet Wilford Woodruff finally declared in

1890 that the Saints would obey the laws of the land and no longer sanction plural

marriages. At the same time, Woodruff oversaw the official separation of the Church

from state affairs, including the abolishment of the Church's political party, the cessation

of Church supervision of the Utah school system, and the end of Mormon communal

economic practices. This process of "Americanization" was the price that the Mormon

community had to pay for the statehood of predominantly Mormon Utah.

Joseph Smith, Jr., was born in 1805, the fourth of nine children of a poor New

England farmer who, during the younger Smith's childhood, repeatedly moved the family

in quest of earning a decent living. Smith's great-grandfathers had been respected men of

property, as had his paternal grandfather, but due to bad luck, foolish business dealings,

and harsh conditions, Smith's parents neither owned their own farm nor earned a

comfortable income. Necessity spurred a move to upstate New York in 1816, where the

Smiths hoped that this less-developed area of better farmland would provide the

economic stability they sought. But the farm in New York, located between the towns of

Manchester and Palmyra, was no more successful than those in New England, and the

family continued to struggle. The Smith children received little formal education, either

because there was not often a school nearby or because they were needed to help run the

family's farms.

2
Gustive O. Larson, The "Americanization " of Utah for Statehood (San Marino, CA: Huntington
Library, 1971) and Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints,
1890-1930, with a foreword by Stephen J. Stein (Urbana, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986; 1996).
 17

To understand Smith's later development of Mormonism, it is important to

understand his religious context. His religious background was unsettled—and unsettling,

as his later visions would attest. After their marriage, both of Smith's parents were, like

many other Americans during this period, indifferent to denominations if not to religion.

In contemporary terms they might have called themselves "spiritual, but not religious."

Joseph Smith, Sr., had flirted with organized Universalism, and was occasionally inspired

by local evangelical revivals, but he remained aloof from institutional religion during his

son's childhood. He was by no means irreligious, however, insisting that the family pray

together daily. He also had several prophetic dreams or visions during his adult life—not

an unusual experience during this period—which he shared with his family and took

seriously as divine messages.4 One of these visions, later recounted by his wife, affirmed

the elder Smith's aversion to institutional churches.5

Smith's mother, Lucy Mack Smith, was more concerned than her husband about

finding a religious home for her family. It was Lucy Smith who brought the family to the

evangelical revivals that converted her father and inspired her husband, and she visited

various Protestant denominations as she sought spiritual guidance for the family. After

the family's move to upstate New York, she and some of her children joined the local

3
See Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People, Studies in Cultural
History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
4
See Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989).
5
Richard Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 1984), 36-39, 49-51. This biography covers Joseph Smith's early life and career up until he
and his newly formed community migrated to Rutland, Ohio, in 1831. Bushman's more recent biography,
Joseph Smith, Rough Stone Rolling: A Cultural Biography of Mormonism's Founder (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2006), covers the same early years but continues to follow Joseph Smith and his church until the
time of his death in 1844.
 18

Presbyterian congregation. But her husband and some of her sons—including Joseph,

Jr.—did not follow her into her church.6

Smith's family was representative of the religious unrest that characterized the

United States in the early nineteenth century. The First Amendment prohibition of

established churches opened up the religious landscape. Suddenly, churches could no

longer count on the government to pay the minister's salary or force attendance on the

part of the unsaved. In order to save souls—and pay the rent—churches had to compete

against one another for the attention of a populace that was no longer required to support

or attend a particular church—or any church.

This unprecedented freedom resulted in an outpouring of religious fervor across

the nation as individuals freed from the constraints of government-sanctioned religion

anxiously sought the religion that would ensure their salvation. Local congregations and

traveling ministers alike competed for the public's attention with revivals that appealed to

the heart, rather than the head, with preaching on the wages of sin and the horrors of

damnation designed to inspire sinners to repentance. Conversion was no longer a matter

of the acceptance of right doctrine, but rather an emotional experience in which

individuals felt the weight of their sins and turned to Jesus for salvation. People turned

from existing denominations that emphasized doctrine and liturgy, like the

Congregationalists and the Episcopalians, and joined the Baptists and Methodists in

droves. These upstart denominations appealed to the egalitarian ideals of the new nation

6
Bushman, Joseph Smith, 39-40, 52-54.
7
See Hatch, Democratization and Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America,
1776 - 1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1992).
 19

by emphasizing individual experience and extending the ministry to all who felt called by

God regardless of education. New religious communities also thrived, sparking into

existence and often flaming out as quickly as they appeared.

This revivalistic fervor was so strong in upstate New York that scholars have

come to call the region "the burned over district," because revivals swept through the
Q

area so frequently and with such violence. Joseph Smith Jr. described this excitement in

his History of the Church:

.. .there was in the place where we lived an unusual excitement about

religion. It commenced with the Methodists, but soon became general
among all the sects in that region of country. Indeed, the whole district of
country seemed affected by it, and great multitudes united themselves to
the different religious parties which created no small stir and division
amongst the people, some crying, "Lo, here!" and others, "Lo, there!"
Some were contending for the Methodist faith, some for the Presbyterian,
and some for the Baptist 9

Smith goes on to express concern over the conflicts raised by the excitement, as every

person, clergy and laity alike, declared his or her own religious community the only right

one. But his community had more to contend with than the established denominations:

the revivalistic fervor also gave birth to a variety of self-declared prophets and

communalistic religions that promised a direct connection to God and a strict code of

laws that, if followed, guaranteed believers a place in heaven. In contrast to the emphasis

on individual faith as the only prerequisite for salvation, such movements promised clear

The classic treatment is Whitney Cross, The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual
History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1950).
9
Joseph Smith—History, vol. 1, 1:5. In Pearl of Great Price (Salt Lake City, UT: The Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1989).
 20

instructions, directly from God himself, on how to behave in this world in order to

achieve salvation in the next.10

Like his parents, his siblings, and his community, Smith was swept up in the

religious seeking that swept the nation during the early nineteenth century. He attended to

his father's visions and his mother's church visits.11 But he remained uncertain. With so

many religious groups asserting so many different "truths" and claiming that theirs was

the only way to salvation, how could he be sure that he would choose the right church?

According to his accounts of his First Vision, recorded many years later, Smith finally

decided to lay his question before God. In the spring of 1820, he went to the woods near

his family's cabin and prayed, asking which church was the true way to salvation.

Joseph Smith did not record an account of the First Vision until 1832, when he

described the event as a personal conversion: God alone appeared to him and forgave his

sins. In an 1835 account he described the appearance of Jesus alongside God. In the final

version, recorded in 1838 and regarded by Latter-day Saints as the official account of the

Smith's experience, God revealed to Smith that the churches were all wrong, and he must

not join any of them.

Three years later, Smith experienced another vision. In the fall of 1823 he

reported he had seen a "personage," Moroni, who delivered the message that God had "a

10
See, for example, Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex
and Salvation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); R. Laurence
Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1977); Ronald L. Numbers, Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White
(New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Stephen J. Stein, The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the
United Society of Believers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
11
Bushman, Joseph Smith, 54.
12
The canonical account of the First Vision is in Joseph Smith—History 1:13-20. For more
discussion of the recorded versions of the First Vision, see Bushman, Joseph Smith, 56-59.
 21

work for [him] to do." Smith's family accepted this vision and those that followed as,

each succeeding year, Smith said Moroni reappeared and accompanied him to a site near

the family farm where, Moroni told him, a record of the earliest American peoples and of

Jesus's ministry among them was buried. This record was recorded in an ancient

language on gold plates, and Smith told his family that God wanted him to translate it

with the help of a pair of seer stones—the Urim and Thummim—that were buried with

the plates. In September of 1827, Smith said that God had finally deemed him worthy and

allowed him to retrieve the plates.14

Critics of Mormon religious beliefs have made much of the fact that during the

same years that he was receiving information about gold plates from a divine messenger,

Joseph Smith was also engaged in the practice of treasure seeking. Like many Americans

in the early nineteenth century, Smith and his family believed that some people could,

with the aid of special stones, locate lost objects, including mines and buried treasure.15

Smith even hired himself out during this period, using a stone he had found to search for

lost riches on the property of his employers. (Smith later insisted that he had given up the

practice at God's command, and that God had only granted him access to the gold plates

when God was certain that Smith would only use the plates for religious purposes and not

Joseph Smith—History 1:30-45. See also Bushman, Joseph Smith, 61-62.

14
For an extended discussion of Smith's visions of Moroni and the retrieval and translation of the
gold plates, see Terryl Givens, '"A Seer Shall My God Raise Up': The Prophet and the Plates," in By the
Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002).
15
Bushman, Joseph Smith, 69-76. Treasure-seeking was one aspect of a continuing belief, among
many Americans, in folk magic. For more on magical beliefs in early Mormonism, see D. Michael Quinn,
Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, revised and enlarged edition (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature
Books, 1998). For more on the intertwining of religious and magical beliefs in early America, see David
Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York:
Knopf, 1989).
 22

for personal gain.) For many people, Smith's refusal to allow others to see or handle the

plates is even more suspicious. But according to Smith, Moroni instructed him not to

allow anyone else access to the gold plates. When his wife and early converts like Martin

Harris, Oliver Cowdery, and David Whitmer served as scribes during the translation

process, he hung a curtain separating himself and the plates from them. Some time during

the months of translation, he stopped bringing out the plates at all, instead looking into

his personal seer stone (not the pair that accompanied the plates) and reading out the

words that he said God placed before his eyes as he looked into it. But as the time for

publishing his translation of the ancient record neared, Smith prayed with Harris,

Cowdery, and Whitmer that they might be allowed to see the plates, and the men reported

that an angel appeared holding the plates and the Urim and Thummim. The three later

signed a "testimony" affirming this vision. Shortly thereafter, according to another

testimony, Smith himself showed the plates to eight other witnesses, mainly members of

the Smith and Whitmer families, who later signed a statement asserting that they "did

handle" and had "seen and hefted" the plates. Both testimonies appeared in the first

edition of the Book of Mormon, published in 1829, and are included in the preface of all

modern editions of the text. As Mormons frequently point out, although a number of the

witnesses later left Smith's church, they did not recant these statements.

The book that Smith produced by this process was the Book of Mormon, a new

scripture that the contemporary Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has subtitled

"Another Testament of Jesus Christ." Smith and his followers understood the book as
 23

supplement to, rather than a replacement of, the Bible.16 The Book of Mormon relates the

story of a family of Israelites, headed by the patriarch Lehi, who left Jerusalem just

before the destruction of the first temple and the Babylonian exile in 600 BCE. Following

God's instructions, Lehi and his sons built a boat which carried them to the Americas,

along with some ancient records of their people (the Book of Mormon includes lengthy

passages from several of the Hebrew Bible prophets).17 In truly biblical fashion the

family promptly broke up in fratricidal squabbling: Nephi, favored by God for his

righteousness, led one community, and his brother Laman another. Eventually their

descendants, Native Americans, built up two warring kingdoms and the bad Lamanites

exterminated the righteous Nephites. The remaining people forgot God and the true

religion until, just after his ministry in ancient Israel, Jesus of Nazareth appeared to them

in the Americas. The people converted to Christianity but, once again, time passed and

the majority forgot their religion. In the fifth century CE, the unrighteous majority wiped

out the remnant of Christ's followers in a final cataclysmic battle. The two survivors—

Mormon, and his son Moroni—took the records of their people's history, added an

account of the great final battle, and buried the plates on a hillside in what is now upstate

New York to be unearthed by a prophet foretold in the text.

After the publication of the Book of Mormon—which drew angry protests and

derisive sneers from the newspapers as well as the Smiths' neighbors even before it was

16
For more on early Mormon uses and understandings of the Bible, see Philip Barlow, Mormons
and the Bible: The Place of Latter-day Saints in American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press,
1991), esp. chapter 2, "From the Birth of the Church to the Death of the Prophet"; also Bushman, Joseph
Smith, ch. 6, "The Restoration of All Things."
17
On the inclusion of passages from the Hebrew Bible in the Book of Mormon, see 1 Nephi 3, and
Givens, By the Hand.
 24

in print—Smith continued to receive revelations from God. Ongoing revelation was the

beginning of what the Latter-day Saints regard as the restoration of all things—as well as

being one of the Mormon beliefs that drew the most criticism from non-believers.

Smith's movement was restorationist, like many other communities established during

the early nineteenth century, in the sense that he sought to reestablish early church as it

was before being corrupted by human mismanagement in the centuries since Jesus. But,

uniquely, Smith's movement also sought to restore aspects of Hebraic religion. The

early Mormons' literal reading of the Bible included a focus on the Hebrew Bible as well

as the Christian New Testament. In addition to the Book of Mormon, Smith's scriptural

innovations included the divinely inspired revision of portions of the Bible and the

translation of another found text, the Book of Abraham. These texts were understood

both as an extension of the known scriptures and more importantly as a sign of God's

continued discourse with humanity through continuing revelation.19

Smith's religion was also, as indicated by the inclusion of the words Latter-day in

the Church's name, millenarian, and early Mormons believed that Jesus's second coming

was imminent. This expectation motivated their practice of gathering together in

centralized communities. It also inspired their efforts to establish a new Zion under the

authority of the Prophet and the priesthood, which the early Mormons believed God had

Shipps, Mormonism.
19
Sec (iivens, By the Hand on the Book of Mormon's primary importance in the nineteenth
century being its proof of Joseph Smith's status as a prophet.
20
See Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 1993).
 25

reestablished through Joseph Smith as it was in ancient times. This priesthood was

eventually extended to all worthy male members of the church—reflecting the emphasis

on lay leadership that characterized the evangelical revivalism of the period—and later

the priesthood would be called upon to oversee the ordinances and rituals established as
99

part of the temple-based practices that Smith instituted in the 1840s.

These beliefs were the core of the religious system on which Joseph Smith

founded his church, organized in 1830 as the Church of Christ and renamed the Church

of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1838. When he organized the Church Smith had

only a few dozen followers, most of them members of his and scribe David Whitmer's

families. But almost immediately, Smith sent four of his staunchest supporters, including

scribe Oliver Cowdery, westward on a mission to convert the Indians. Despite its size,

however, this small community, made even smaller by the departure of the missionaries,

attracted local ire. Neighbors believed Smith's claims of divine revelation were a

heretical con and the Book of Mormon a fraud. To escape this opposition, including legal

proceedings arising from his treasure-seeking past, Smith moved his small community

out of New York. He called his followers, in 1831, to gather their belongings and move

to Kirtland, Ohio, where his missionaries had converted more than one hundred

Campbellites.
21
The most extensive treatment of the restoration and development of the priesthood in
Mormonism is D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (Salt Lake City, UT:
Signature Books, 1994). See also Klaus Hansen, Political Empire: The Council of Fifty and the Mormon
Quest for Power (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1974).
22
For a basic overview of early Mormon beliefs, see Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The
Mormon Experience: The Latter-day Saints in America, 2nd ed. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,
1992), ch. 2, "The Appeals of Mormonism." For a more in-depth discussion with extensive historical
context for the development of Mormon beliefs, see John L. Brooke, The Refiner's Fire: The Making of
Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
 26

As Smith and the main body of his followers, including his parents and siblings

and their families, were settling in Ohio, his missionaries continued westward, eventually

reaching the extreme frontier of U. S. territory in Missouri. During a visit to the area,

Smith proclaimed that God wanted the Saints to establish their new Zion in Jackson

County, Missouri, near the settlement of Independence. Thus while the majority of his

followers gathered around him in Kirtland, a small community of Mormons settled in

Missouri. Smith's assertion that God had promised previously settled land to the Saints,

along with the Saints' practice of only doing business with fellow Mormons when

possible, did not sit well with non-Mormon settlers. The more established Gentiles

believed the Saints were trying to drive them out of the territory. An editorial in a

Mormon newsletter exacerbated these tensions by hinting that the Saints supported the

abolition of slavery, which angered predominantly pro-slavery Missourians. To some

such a stance on slavery combined with the Saints' missionary work among the Indians

looked like an attempt to stir up a rebellion against the old settlers. Their mistrust only

grew as the Mormon community increased.

By 1835, there were between 1,500 and 2,000 Saints in and around Kirtland,

Ohio. Much like the non-Mormons in Missouri, the Mormons' Ohio neighbors were not

happy about the influx of members of what seemed a strange new religion. They were

displeased with Mormon economic dominance of the area, and feared that the growing

community could exert too much influence in local and state politics. Further, the

Ohioans' awareness that individual Mormons would vote as the hierarchy preached they

ought seemed an unforgivable breach of the nation's relatively new practice of separating
 27

church and state—another Mormon characteristic that has long provided fodder for

critics. When the Saints established and operated a bank without a state charter and with

Smith at the helm and the bank failed, internal dissension combined with non-Mormon

opposition in the area. Late one night Smith and his counselor Sidney Rigdon were

dragged from their homes, badly beaten, and tarred and feathered. With criminal charges

pending against him over the illegal operation of the bank, Smith decided it was once

again time for the Saints to join their brethren in Missouri.

But the non-Mormon community in Independence had also become violent,

assaulting church members and burning homes and fields. Mormon appeals to local and

state authorities fell on deaf ears, and government officials simply told the Saints that

they needed to leave the area. So the Missouri Saints also gathered their belongings and,

selling their property to the old settlers at a significant loss, went to meet the Ohio Saints

in Caldwell County, in the northern part of the Missouri territory.

The state government promised the Saints they would be unmolested as long as

they remained within the boundaries of their "Mormon county." But the Saints quickly

discovered that they wanted more room than the state had allotted to them and began

settling to the south in Clay County—an ill-advised move given that Clay County shared

a boundary with Jackson County. Once again the surrounding non-Mormon community

attacked, and once again the state refused to protect the Saints. In fact, Governor Lilburn

Boggs responded to the Saints' requests for assistance by issuing his now-infamous

executive order, dated October 27, 1838, which declared that "the Mormons must be

treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the
 28

public peace." On October 30, emboldened by the governor's order, the local militia

attacked the Mormon settlement of Haun's Mill. The women and children of the

community fled into the woods surrounding the village, and the men ran to retrieve a

cache of weapons from the local blacksmith's shop. The militia surrounded the shop and,

aiming through the crevices in the roughly finished walls, opened fire on the Mormon

men and boys inside. When the dust settled at least eighteen Saints were dead, including

a ten-year-old boy.

Boggs and other officials justified the continuing violence against the Saints as

self-defense, arguing that the Mormons had long treated the laws of the state and the

nation with utter disregard and had proven their lawlessness and their violent intentions

toward non-Mormons by organizing the Danites in 1838. This secret group, organized

with Smith's permission for the purpose of protecting Mormon communities from the

mobs allowed free rein by state officials, eventually began launching retaliatory raids

against Gentile communities. Church leaders' rhetoric further inflamed Mormon-Gentile

animosities. Sidney Rigdon, for example, delivered fiery speeches in June and July of

1838, including the notorious "Salt Sermon," in which he took up the language of

extermination used by the Saints' enemies and compared the Gentile community to salt

that has lost its savor and should be cast out. Smith and other leaders also routinely

prayed in public that God would destroy the Saints' enemies. Thus the Mormons seemed

determined to match their Gentile neighbors curse for curse and blow for blow, and non-

23
"Governor Boggs Extermination Order," Missouri Digital Heritage, online at
http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/mormon.asp. Accessed March 10, 2010. The state of Missouri
did not officially rescind the so-called "extermination order" until 1976.
 29

Mormon authorities pointed to such words and actions as proof that the Saints respected

neither Gentiles nor the law. When Sampson Avard, the erstwhile leader of the Danites,

testified at trial that Joseph Smith had organized the group for the purpose of pillaging

and murdering Gentiles, his non-Mormon listeners were only too willing to believe him.24

Thus the Saints' reputation for violence was born.

The Mormons moved again in 1839, this time across the Mississippi River to the

state of Illinois. Eager to please the Prophet and his thousands of voting followers, and

responsive to the outrage that many residents of Illinois initially felt on behalf of the

persecuted newcomers, the politicians in control of the state government granted Smith a

charter for his new city, Nauvoo, that gave it near-autonomy. The city charter included

permission for the Saints to form a local militia, the Nauvoo Legion, of which Smith

named himself Lieutentant-General. He was also elected mayor of the bustling city which

shortly boasted a population of more than 10,000 Mormons. The Mormons continued to

pursue their efforts to build God's kingdom on earth under the leadership of the Prophet,

reinforcing critics' claims that the Saints were engaged in a thoroughly un-American

theocratic intermingling of religious and secular affairs.

The Saints' unique religious beliefs also offended their non-Mormon neighbors.

As early as 1832, Smith revealed to his followers that the afterlife was made up of a

tiered system of heavens in which Mormon men who attained the highest sphere would

continue to progress throughout eternity toward godhood. This understanding of the

24
See Leland H. Gentry, "The Danite Band of 1838," Brigham Young University Studies 14, no. 4
(Summer 1974), 421^50, and Stephen C. LeSueur, "Danites Reconsidered," John Whitmer Historical
Association Journal 14 (1994), 1-15. Nineteenth-century historian Hubert Howe Bancroft described
Rigdon's addresses as "perhaps natural" but, under the circumstances, "exceedingly impolitic" (The
History of Utah, 1540-1887 [San Francisco, CA: The History Company, 1889], 120).
 30

nature of humanity's place in the cosmos led to a belief in an ever-growing plurality of

gods, all of whom were men who had once been human but had achieved godhood as
•ye

they perfected themselves in the afterlife. Essential to this progress was the practice of

celestial marriage, known to the non-Mormon world as polygamy. According to Smith's

revelation, recorded in 1843 and secretly put into practice at that time by the highest

members of the priesthood, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, God had reinstituted the

biblical practice of a man taking multiple wives.

Because, according to the Mormon understanding of the afterlife, human beings

are purely physical beings (spirit being a highly refined form of matter), and because the

heavenly spheres are perfected realms that recapitulate earthly existence, the family unit

is essential to the Mormon understanding of existence in the afterlife. The purpose of a

man taking multiple wives was to build up a large family that would travel through the

afterlife with him. To ensure that family members would remain together beyond this

lifetime into eternity, husbands and wives, and parents and children, were "sealed" to one

Joseph Smith, Section 76, Doctrine and Covenants. Online at http://www.lds.org. See also
"King Follett Discourse," Mormon Literature Website [sic]. Online at http://mldb.bvu.edu. Lorenzo Snow,
who served as President of the Church from 1898 to 1901, described this doctrine: "As man now is, God
once was; as God is now man may be." See "Lorenzo Snow—Quotes," The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints: Church History, online at http://www.lds.org/churchhistory/history.
26
There is evidence that Smith may have practiced celestial marriage as early as the Kirtland years
(see, for example, Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon
Prophet, 2nd ed., revised and enlarged [New York: Vintage Books, 1995; 1st ed. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., 1945], 184-87, and Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 323-27,436-46). He apparently did not
begin discussing the revelation with the Apostles until some time in 1840 after they settled in Nauvoo. In
an oft-quoted statement on his introduction to the concept of plural marriage, the second Prophet Brigham
Young recalled, "it was the first time in my life I had desired the grave, and I could hardly get over it for a
long time. And when I saw a funeral, I felt to envy the corpse its situation, and to regret that I was not in the
coffin, knowing the toil and labor that my body would have to undergo; and I have had to examine myself,
from that day to this, and watch my faith, and carefully meditate, lest I should be found desiring the grave
more than I ought to do" (quoted in Leonard Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses, paperback ed.
[Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986; hardback ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1985], 100).
 31

another in sacred rituals performed in the temple, which during the Nauvoo period

became central to Mormon theology and practice.

Smith had first called the Latter-day Saint community to build a temple during the

early 1830s in Kirtland, Ohio, through a revelation calling for a temple in which God

would bestow endowments on chosen individuals. The cornerstones of the building were

laid with great ceremony in 1833, and Smith dedicated the temple in 1836. The

priesthood was essential to temple functions, and in Kirtland Smith reorganized church

government under the hierarchical ranks of the priesthood: the lesser Aaronic priesthood

and higher Melchizedek priesthood; quorums of deacons, teachers, priests, and elders;

high councils overseeing the operation of local communities; the Twelve Apostles

serving directly under the First Presidency; the First Presidency itself, consisting of two

counselors to the prophet; and finally the Prophet himself, who also serves as the
97

President of the church. Not only was the hierarchy necessary to administer the temple

rites, but the temple was also necessary in order to endow the priesthood. Thus, even

before the introduction of the most innovative temple rituals, the temple was central to

Mormon life.

In addition to the sealing of celestial marriages, at Nauvoo temple practices

expanded to include baptism for the dead. Founded on the Mormon understanding of the

eternity of the family as well as the essential place of the physical body in all Mormon

practice, baptism by proxy allowed members of the Church to go through baptism in the

27
See "Priesthood and Church Government: 1834 - 35,"in Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling. For a
more in-depth description, see Quinn, Mormon Hierarchy, esp. ch. 1, "The Evolution of Authority," and ch.
2, "The First Five Presiding Priesthood Quorums."
 32

place of family members who died without knowing the truth of the Gospel as restored

by Joseph Smith. This baptism did not ensure that the person for whom it was performed

would enter the Mormon community in the afterlife. Based on the Mormon belief that the

physical ritual had to be performed in this plane of existence in order for a person to enter

the community of Saints and achieve their highest potential in the afterlife, the ritual

allowed the deceased the chance to choose to embrace Mormonism in the afterlife that

they would not have otherwise had.

But these peculiar new religious practices once again raised the ire of the Saints'

neighbors. While many in Illinois had been sympathetic to the Mormons' plight as they

fled the violence across the river in Missouri, Smith's community continued to grow until

there were more than 10,000 church members gathered in and around Nauvoo, making it

the second largest city in the state by 1844.28 These new residents traded almost

exclusively within their own community, and were rumored to charge higher prices of

"Gentiles"—the Saints' term for non-Mormons. As party politicians had hoped—or

feared and resented, if they failed to gain the Prophet's support—the Saints continued

voting as a bloc, and their ever-increasing numbers made them a significant factor in state

elections. Further, Joseph Smith's seemingly total control of the community smacked of a

theocracy. When, after years of appeals to the federal government for assistance in

gaining reparations from the state of Missouri went unanswered, Smith announced

himself as a candidate for President of the United States in the 1844 election, these

suspicions seemed confirmed.

Arrington and Bitton, 69.

 33

More than all the rest, during the early 1840s non-Mormons were outraged by the

rumors of polygamy that swirled around the Prophet and his closest advisors. To

Gentiles, plural marriage looked like a mere contrivance to give the leaders' lusts free

rein. Since Smith had received the revelation concerning plural marriage in the early

1830s, he had only shared the revelation with his closest circle of advisors. He feared that

most members of the Church were not ready for such a radical departure from the
9Q

monogamy so vigorously dictated by the rest of American society. But word of his

secret began to reach members and non-members alike in spite of his caution, in part

through the efforts of excommunicated members like John C. Bennett. Bennett, who had

for a short time served as one of Smith's highest counselors, was ejected from the Church

and from Nauvoo after other leaders discovered that he was using the secret revelation on

plural marriage as a license for seduction. But regardless of his own colorful history,

Bennett's 1842 History of the Saints, or, An Expose of Joe Smith and Mormonism

convinced many readers that the leaders of the Church were treating the city of Nauvoo

as their own private brothel. Sensational claims like Bennett's inspired other members

to leave because they viewed plural marriage as an abominable affront to moral decency.

Some of these ex-members, or apostates, printed and distributed a newsletter in Nauvoo

in 1844 that outed Smith and the highest members of the priesthood as polygamists.

29
This caution did not prevent Smith from marrying dozens of women "for eternity." By one
count, he may have had over forty wives at the time of his death (see Brodie, 297-308,457-88, and
Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 436-46, 490-99). Although his first (and only legal) wife, Emma Hale
Smith, later denied all knowledge of her husband's practice of plural marriage and claimed that polygamy
had been introduced among the Saints by Brigham Young after her husband's death, there is solid evidence
that she knew of at least some of his additional wives and gave her consent to some of those marriages
(Brodie, 339^13, 399^100, 475, 480; Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 490-99).
30
Boston, MA: Leland & Whiting, 1842.
 34

Smith responded in typical frontier style: he ordered the printing press that had produced

the Nauvoo Expositor destroyed along with all copies of the paper. The offending

apostates left town fearing for their safety.31

This act gave the surrounding non-Mormon officials the opening they had been

waiting for: the destruction of the printing press looked like an assault on the

Constitutionally-protected rights of freedom of speech and the press. Smith once again

faced arrest by an unfriendly government, and he feared that this time he would not

survive. He was right. After considering and rejecting flight, knowing that if he did not

give himself up then the residents of the city would be subjected to greater violence,

Joseph surrendered on June 25, 1844. A local non-Mormon militia escorted him, along

with his brother Hyrum and a handful of close associates, to the jail in nearby Carthage,

Illinois. During the journey to Carthage, the governor of Illinois, Thomas Ford,

accompanied Smith and his fellow prisoners in order to ensure their safety. After seeing

them installed in the jail under the supervision of the militia, Ford left Carthage.

The governor either overestimated the militia's loyalty to him or underestimated

their hatred of Joseph Smith and his religion. Ford left the Smiths in the charge of a

militia made up entirely of non-Mormons whose captain, an outspoken anti-Mormon,

was also the judge who had arraigned Smith and his brother Hyrum on charges of

treason. These men were joined after Ford's departure by members of another, recently-

disbanded, militia unit. In the late afternoon of June 27, 1844, a mob surrounded the jail

and, meeting almost no resistance from the militiamen on guard, stormed upstairs to the

31
See Arrington and Bitton, 77-78; Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 541-42.
 35

room where the Smiths were being held. Hyrum was killed first. Smith fired on the

attackers with a pistol that a Church member had smuggled in to him, and then ran to the

window intending to escape by jumping to the ground two stories below. But a hostile

crowd still surrounded the building, and they fired on Smith from without as the men

inside the jail fired on him from within. He was hit four times and fell to the ground
^9

outside, where he died almost immediately.

While many of the non-Mormon residents of Carthage fled the city fearing

reprisals from nearby Nauvoo, in fact Smith's followers were too stunned to respond.

Many of the Church's highest leaders, including members of the Quorum of the Twelve

Apostles, were away from Nauvoo on missions when the Smiths were murdered. But the

return of those leaders did little to dispel the confusion that gripped the Mormons. Smith

had not established a clear mechanism for succession in the Church leadership before his

death, and in short order a number of his family members and close associates claimed

the Prophet's mantle. While a number of small groups left Nauvoo under the guidance of

various self-proclaimed prophets, the largest number of Latter-day Saints eventually

divided between two main factions.

The smaller group, opposed to the leadership of Brigham Young and the Quorum

of the Twelve Apostles, eventually organized around the claim that the leadership of the

Church should be passed down within Smith's family. Although his oldest son, Joseph

Smith III, was not old enough in 1844 to lead, in 1860, at the age of twenty-eight, he

accepted the call to lead the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

32
See Arrington and Bitton, 78-82, and Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 537-50.
 36

Rejecting nearly all of the innovations revealed at Nauvoo, the RLDS eliminated plural

marriage, baptism for the dead, and temple ordinances, as well as the belief in the

plurality of gods and the call for the Saints to gather and build an earthly kingdom of

God. The Reorganized Church focused on Smith's earlier teachings including continuing

revelation (especially the Book of Mormon) and the restoration of the true church of

Jesus Christ.

But the vast majority of the Church's members followed the Quorum of the

Twelve Apostles that had been established by their murdered Prophet and was headed by

Brigham Young. This majority sustained the Quorum's authority in August 1844, and in

so doing effectively accepted Young as Smith's successor.34 Young, an early convert to

Mormonism, was one of Smith's most faithful followers and a devout believer in all of

the innovations Smith introduced at Nauvoo, as evidenced by his unhappy acceptance of

the duty of plural marriage in 1842.35 Thus the greater part of Smith's Church embraced

the hierarchy he had established and the new religious practices that hierarchy continued

Arrington and Bitton, 91-93; Shipps, Mormonism, 84, and "The Latter-day Saints," in
Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience: Studies of Traditions and Monuments, vol. 1, Charles
H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams, eds. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), 652-54. In 2000, the
Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was renamed the Community of Christ—a name
more reflective of Joseph Smith, Jr.'s original name for his organization, the Church of Christ (see Givens,
By the Hand of Mormon, 184-85).
34
Arrington and Bitton, 83-86. Young was not officially named the second Prophet and President
until 1847.
35
Smith sealed Young to his first plural wife in June of 1842. Young's first wife knew of and
approved the marriage (see Arrington, Brigham Young, 100-103). Young eventually married twenty-seven
women "for time," meaning that he married them intending to care for and treat them as wives in this
world; of these, sixteen bore him children. He also was sealed "for eternity"—with no apparent intention to
live with or care for them in a temporal sense, but with the intention of including them in his family in the
afterlife—to an additional thirty women (it is likely that Young was also sealed "for eternity" to the wives
to whom he was married "for life"). For a list of Young's wives and children, see Arrington, "Appendix C:
Brigham Young's Family," Brigham Young, 420-21.
 37

to practice. Both the religious beliefs and the theocratic leadership of the community that

many non-Mormons hated and feared persisted despite Smith's death.

Those among the Saints' neighbors who had believed that Mormonism would die

with its founder, as happened with so many movements born of early nineteenth-century

religious excitement, were sorely disappointed. After their Prophet's death many Saints

remained at Nauvoo, continuing work on the temple that Smith had called them to build

while the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles consolidated their leadership and firmly

established Smith's most recent teachings. When a few months proved that Mormonism

had outlived its founder, the non-Mormons had once again had enough. Mobs began

raiding outlying Mormon villages and homesteads and, at Young's direction, terrorized

Saints fled to the city of Nauvoo for the protection afforded by numbers. In January 1845,

the state repealed the charter that had granted the city such complete autonomy when the

Mormons initially settled there—including the right to organize a militia for self-

protection—and the state militia made it clear that the Saints should not expect their aid.

Even Governor Ford wrote to warn Young that "surrounded by such neighbors I confess I

do not foresee the time when you will be permitted to enjoy quiet," and suggested that the

Saints leave the state.

The Church leadership quickly mobilized, researching the lands west of the

United States in what was then Mexican territory, where they eventually identified the

unsettled region south of the Salt Lake Valley as their destination. Determined to

complete the temple in order to perform endowments and "temple work"— ordinances

Quoted in Arrington, Brigham Young, 123.

 38

for the living and the dead, including baptisms and the sealing of marriages—the Saints

set a departure date of April 1846. But their neighbors and state officials wanted them

gone immediately. Young and other community leaders were indicted on charges of

counterfeiting—leaving the Saints in fear that more of the priesthood would be murdered

while in the hands of the state—and Governor Ford wrote to Young claiming that federal

troops in St. Louis were preparing to destroy the Mormons. At the same time, mob and

militia attacks on the city of Nauvoo increased in number and severity. These actions had

the desired effect: the Apostles speeded up preparations for what Young called "the

exodus of the nation of the only true Israel from these United States."37 The first group of

Saints left the city to begin the trek west on February 4.

The Mormon exodus to the west has become the stuff of American legend and

remains one subject on which non-Mormons are more than willing to praise the Latter-

day Saints. Historian Winthrop Hudson calls it "one of the great epic stories of American

history."38 The Saints journeyed far and suffered immense hardship at the hands of their

fellow Americans. Once again they sold their homes and their possessions for far less

than they were worth or abandoned what they could neither sell nor carry. The weather

was both a hindrance and a help: when the frigid temperatures dropped well below zero

on February 24 it froze the Mississippi River, allowing the evacuating Saints to walk

their teams and wagons across. The early start guaranteed that the Saints' provisions

would run short, and the barren winter landscape provided little. Under these harsh

37
Quoted in Arrington, Brigham Young, 126.
38
Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965). The first leg of the Mormons' journey took them through the
territory of Iowa, where established settlers were anxious to keep the Mormons from settling down.
39
Arrington, Brigham Young, 127.
 39

conditions, approximately one person in thirty died at just one way station on the trail

during the first year of the migration.40 But necessity and commitment drove the Saints

onward, and behind Brigham Young's advance party of 148 people approximately 1,700

Saints arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. Eventually, more than 15,000 residents of

Nauvoo crossed the plains to the Saints' new home.41

With the Saints safely separated from their closest neighbors by one thousand

miles and a protective barrier of mountains, Brigham Young settled in to build a new

Zion, God's kingdom on Earth under the temporal and spiritual leadership of the Prophet

as it had been imagined by Joseph Smith. All Mormons were required to contribute their

goods and their labor, and individual communities were based on varying degrees of

economic communitarianism. Goods—especially foodstuffs—were held in common

under the management of the priesthood, and redistributed to individuals and families

according to their needs. Those who could not contribute money, goods, or labor were

cared for as each community was able. Each settlement was carefully planned: Mormon

settlers built homes and irrigation ditches planted crops first, followed by a local ward

house (church) as soon as labor could be spared from agriculture and finally a school.

The Saints called their new home Deseret, a Book of Mormon word meaning honeybee,

to signify their commitment to working together as a community for the good of the

whole. This unity of purpose and the success it brought the Mormons in making the

desert "blossom as the rose" earned the Saints respect, albeit of a grudging kind, from an

40
Arrington and Bitton, 98. The way station in question was Winter Quarters, Nebraska, which the
Mormons established as permanent camp that would shelter succeeding waves of migrants on their way to
the Salt Lake Valley. Winter Quarters is now part of the city of Omaha.
41
Arrington and Bitton, 101. Brigham Young's party crossed the Wasatch Mountains into the Salt
Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, which is still celebrated in Utah as Pioneer Day.
 40

American populace with a mania for taming the frontier and carrying out the work of the

doctrine of Manifest Destiny by making the breadth of the North American continent,

from sea to shining sea, part of the United States.42

Almost as soon as they had established themselves beyond American borders, the

Saints found themselves within the United States again when Mexico ceded Deseret to

the U.S. after the Mexican War. Church leaders, determined to maintain self-rule, quickly

organized a state government complete with a governor, lieutenant governor, and various

lower officials, and petitioned for statehood in 1849.43 Not surprisingly, given the

Mormons' commitment to building a kingdom where religion governed daily life, these

government positions were filled with the ranks of the priesthood in order of their

importance in the Church, with Brigham Young at the helm. While these officers and a

state Constitution were approved by majority vote within Deseret, the U.S. Congress only

granted the Mormons territorial status. Further, Congress radically decreased the size of

the Mormon territory: from an original claim that included most of present-day Utah and

Nevada, half of Colorado and Arizona, and portions of Idaho, Oregon, New Mexico,

Wyoming, and southern California, the federal government reduced the Mormons'

portion of the western frontier to the present-day state of Utah. Finally, the name the

Saints had chosen from their own scripture was replaced in favor of Utah, chosen by a

The Saints themselves described their success in making the desert "blossom as the rose,"
making reference to Isaiah 35:1: "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the
desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose." (The reference is to the King James Version of the Bible,
which remains the Mormons' preferred translation.)
43
The Saints had no choice about rejoining the nation, as the Mexican War ended with the United
States taking possession of the land on which they had settled.
 41

congressional committeeman based on the name of the Ute Indians who inhabited the
44

region.

In Great Salt Lake City, the heart of Deseret, Young oversaw not only his

people's religion but also their mundane activities. He organized the city according to

plans initially laid out by Joseph Smith, putting streets and house lots on an orderly grid

surrounding a central square. The Saints etched their commitment to their religion in the

geography of their new city, breaking ground in the central square in the 1850s for the

temple that was to be the center of Mormon life in the new Zion. This was a visible sign,

for all who visited the Mormon territory, of the Latter-day Saints' intention not only to

continue the practices that had so offended their neighbors in New York, Ohio, Missouri,

and finally Illinois, but to put their religion at the heart of their daily lives. After gaining

territorial status, the Saints made a much stronger declaration of their determined

independence from American social norms and legal restrictions on their religion: on

August 29, 1852, Church leaders read Joseph Smith's revelation concerning plural

marriage publicly for the first time. Apostle Orson Pratt delivered the first public

statement on the subject, followed by Brigham Young who stated that although the

doctrine had not previously been made public, "this people have believed in it for many

Larson, 5. See also Arrington and Bitton, ch. 6, "The Challenge of Building the Kingdom."
While the federal government was certainly motivated by a desire to keep the Mormons in check, all
western petitions for territorial status and statehood were caught up in the debates over slavery that
preceded the Civil War. Utah was admitted to the nation as a free territory under the Compromise of 1850
(Arrington and Bitton, 163).
 42

years."45 No longer would the Saints hide their practice of divinely commanded plural

(celestial) marriage from a disapproving world.

Public outrage in the United States was powerful and swift. The conventions

established for dealing with threatening religious minorities in anti-Catholic literature of

the early nineteenth century were quickly adapted to attack the Mormons.46 Self-

proclaimed "memoirs" like Female Life among the Mormons, published under the

pseudonym Maria Ward, condemned the Mormons' religion as false, their leaders as

lascivious old men who used mesmeric powers to ensnare young female converts, and

members themselves as either cruel and power mad or gullible and stupid. Depicting

Mormonism as a fraud contrived by Joseph Smith and perpetuated by the highest

members of the priesthood to gain money, power, and women, such anti-Mormon

literature assured Gentile readers that the Saints were anything but. Anti-Mormon authors

confirmed their readers' worst fears that the Saints' religion was false, their marital

practices a hotbed of lecherous immorality that victimized women and children, their

treatment of outsiders and dissenters was unerringly violent, and their intermingling of

News of the newly public revelation spread quickly. It was reprinted in the Church's official
newspaper, the Deseret News, in September 1852, and shortly thereafter in the Church's English newspaper
the Latter-day Saints' Millennial Star (Larson, 37 n. 2). The revelation was incorporated into the Doctrine
and Covenants as section 132.
46
See David Brion Davis, "Some Themes of Countersubversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic,
Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature," The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 41, no. 2 (Sep.,
1960): 105-224. See also Terryl Givens, '"Ground in the Presbyterian Smut Machine': The Popular Press,
Fiction, and Moral Crusading," The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
 43

religious and secular affairs snubbed American ideals while controlling members' wallets

and votes for the benefit of the highest leaders.47

Not all of the tales that authors' exploited in this fashion were fictional. The

Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which a group of Mormons and Indians in southern

Utah murdered an entire wagon train of American emigrants bound for California, has

provided critics with ammunition almost from the moment it took place until the present

day.48 But depictions seldom relate the full context of the event. In spite of (or perhaps as

an effective distraction from) the growing threats of civil war over the issue of slavery,

politicians united in calls to force the Mormons to cease and desist their debauchery. In

1856, the newly formed Republican party—soon to send its first President to

Washington—was established on a platform with one key plank: to end the "twin relics

of barbarism," slavery and polygamy. The national government reacted by sending a

variety of non-Mormon appointees to fill territorial positions overseen by the federal

government, with the intention of using these judges and territorial officials to quash the

practice of polygamy. But with juries made up entirely of believing Mormons (in the

Female Life among the Mormons; A Narrative of Many Years' Personal Experience, by the Wife
of a Mormon Elder Recently from Utah (New York: J.C. Derby, 1855). Available online at
www.google.com/books.
48
The Mountain Meadows Massacre has provided the primary plot or backdrop for endless books
and movies about the Saints, including T. B. H. Stenhouse, Rocky Mountain Saints: A Full and Complete
History of the Mormons (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1873); John D. Lee, Mormonism
Unveiled, or, The Life and Confessions of the Late Mormon Bishop John D. Lee (St. Louis, MO: Bryan,
Brand, & Company, 1877); Jack London, The Star Rover (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1915);
Merritt Parmelee Allen, Out of a Clear Sky (Longmans, Green & Co., 1938); Amelia Bean, The Fancher
Train (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1958); William Wise, Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American
Legend and a Monumental Crime (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976); Christopher Cain, dir.,
September Dawn (USA: Sony Pictures, 2007). The massacre remains such an influential subject in
depictions of Mormonism that the Mormon History Association has dedicated a panel to it at their 2011
national meeting: "The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Public Perceptions of Mormonism," St. George,
UT, May 27, 2011.
 44

1850s, fewer than ten percent of Utah residents were non-Mormons) and members of the

church hierarchy filling all elected positions in the territory, the federal appointees found

themselves powerless to act.

One thing they could do, however, was send reports back to Washington.

Outraged at the Church's total control of the territory and angered by their own relative

insignificance, federal officials reported to President James Buchanan that the territory

was, for all intents and purposes, in a state of rebellion. Upon tendering his resignation,

Judge W. W. Drummond accused the Saints of running a theocratic kingdom within the

state, wherein church and state were fused and the word of the leaders of the Church—

particularly Brigham Young—was law; of perpetuating a secret society (presumably the

Danites) whose purpose was "to take both the lives and the property of persons who may

question the authority of the Church"; and of the harassment of federal officers and

judges, including the destruction of official court records, with Brigham Young's full

knowledge and consent. Finally, Drummond claimed

[t]hat the federal officers are daily compelled to hear the form of the
American government traduced, the chief executives of the nation, both
living and dead, slandered and abused from the masses as well as from all
the leading members of the Church, in a most vulgar, loathsome, and
wicked manner that the evil passions of men can possibly conceive.49

Letter dated March 30, 1857. Quoted in Larson, 17-18. Drummond's assertion that the
Mormons had destroyed court records proved to be false, but it greatly influenced President Buchanan's
perception of the "Mormon problem" (see, for example, Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows
Massacre, foreword and afterword by Jan Shipps, 1st paperback ed. [Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1991; first edition Stanford University Press, 1950], 18). Many historians note that while Drummond
and other federal officials were virtually powerless in the face of the theocratic merger of the Saints'
kingdom with the territorial government, Drummond especially was disregarded because his immoral
behavior—he brought a prostitute with him to Utah as his companion, having left his family behind in
Illinois—deeply offended the community. See Larson, 17-18, esp. n. 40; Arrington, Brigham Young, 233;
Arrington and Bitton, 165; and Givens, Viper, 37.
 45

Faced with rumblings of secession from the South and determined to begin his

presidency on a strong footing, Buchanan decided to make an example out of the

rebellious Mormon territory. In May, he appointed a new set of officials and ordered

2,500 federal troops to accompany them to Utah and take control of the territory. He

made his decision without communicating with any Mormon officials—including

Brigham Young, who was still the elected governor of the territory—and did not inform

the territorial government that he was sending the new officials with such a large military

escort.50

Word of the approaching troops reached Salt Lake City on July 24, 1857—the

tenth anniversary of the Saints' arrival in their new Zion. To the Saints, for most of whom

the memories of mob violence in Missouri and Illinois and the murder of their Prophet

were still raw, the federal troops appeared as invaders intent on the destruction of the

Mormon people. The fact that the government had sent the troops stoked rather than

calmed such fears, as those who had lived through the "Mormon Wars" in Missouri and

the exodus from Nauvoo clearly remembered the state governments' complicity with

anti-Mormon mobs as well as the federal government's consistent refusal to protect the

Saints or help them gain redress for lost property and lives.51

News of the impending invasion reached the Saints during a period of intentional

Reformation within the Church. Concerned that his people were becoming lax in their

50
For a full account of the events surrounding the Mountain Meadows Massacre, see Arrington,
"The 'Invasion' of Utah," Brigham Young, 250-71.
51
Role of persecution in defining the Saints. Jan Shipps, "Difference and Otherness: Mormonism
and the American Religious Mainstream," in Minority Faiths and the American Protestant Mainstream,
Jonathan Sarna, ed. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998); R. Laurence Moore, "How to Become
a People: The Mormon Scenario," in Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986).
 46

religious duties, Brigham Young initiated the movement in 1856 to reinvigorate the

Mormons' faith from the heart of Salt Lake City to the furthest reaches of Deseret.

Missionaries appointed by Church leaders delivered revivalistic calls for repentance

accompanied by the teaching of doctrine, and individual members who satisfied local

leaders of their commitment were rebaptized as a sign of their renewed covenants with

the Church and the community. Thus when word of the approaching troops reached the

Saints, the entire territory was gripped by a feverish religious excitement and the newly

recommitted Mormons were zealously eager to fight in defense of their faith. In the late

summer of 1857, Young declared martial law in the territory and the entire population

prepared to face the coming invasion.

An emigrant train sometimes referred to as the Fancher train or the Arkansas

company, a group of approximately 120 men, women, and children from Arkansas and

Missouri en route to California, rolled into this heated atmosphere in July 1857. The

group followed a route that took them through southern Utah, an area where Brigham

Young's Reformation had met with particular success. As the Gentile emigrants

progressed through the territory, both sides contributed to an increasingly tense

relationship between the travelers and the locals: Saints, obeying Young's orders to the

entire territory, refused to sell supplies to the outsiders, and some of the emigrants

responded by openly deriding Mormonism and committing minor property damage.

According to local residents, some members of the wagon train went so far as to claim

52
Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard, Massacre at Mountain
Meadows (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 24-27. See also Brooks, 11-13; Arrington and
Bitton, 212-13.
 47

that they participated in the mob violence that drove the Saints out of Missouri and joked

about having been present at the murders of Joseph and Hyrum Smith or the more recent

killing, in Arkansas, of Apostle Parley P. Pratt.53 Worst of all, local residents claimed to

have heard members of the Fancher party talking about returning from California with an

army to control or wipe out the rebellious Mormons.54

While the exact circumstances leading up to what has become known as the

Mountain Meadows Massacre can never be certain, the local Saints' response to a group

they regarded as obnoxious outsiders is sure. On September 7, 1857, while the wagon

train was camped at Mountain Meadows in southern Utah, a group including Mormon

Bishop John D. Lee, an adopted son of Brigham Young and a leader in the local militia,

and local Indians attacked the emigrants. After four days of fighting, on September 11

Lee, supported by a contingent of Mormon militiamen, approached the circled wagons

under a flag of truce and told the emigrants that the Mormons had negotiated with the

Indians to end the siege: the travelers must turn over their wagons, cattle, and possessions

to the Indians, and walk out of their camp unarmed. The Mormons would escort them to

safety in nearby Cedar City. Uncertain whether the Mormons were in fact friend or foe,

the emigrants were nevertheless out of ammunition and supplies and therefore agreed to

Lee's terms and surrendered their weapons. The Mormon escort and their Indian co-

conspirators viciously murdered every person in the party with the exception of seventeen

children under the age of eight.

53
Pratt was murdered in northwest Arkansas in May 1857. For a full account, see Steven Pratt,
"Eleanor McLean and the Murder of Parley P. Pratt," BYU Studies 15, no. 2 (Winter 1975), 225-52.
Available online at http://byustudies.byu.edu.
34
Walker, Turley, and Leonard, 93-94, 133, 135, 142; Brooks, ch. 3, "The Zealous South," esp.
43-50.
 48

Once word of the slaughter got out, non-Mormons accused Brigham Young of

orchestrating the massacre in order to steal the Fancher party's substantial property.

Although evidence clearly shows that Brigham Young neither ordered the massacre nor

knew of it in advance, the Church leadership was fully aware that Young's policies on the

treatment of Gentile emigrant trains and the fiery rhetoric employed regarding the

impending arrival of federal troops had fostered the volatile situation.55 Further, Young—

who discovered after the massacre that local Church officials had ordered and

participated in the attack—at first claimed that no Mormons were involved and laid the

blame squarely on local Indians. But when the evidence against the Mormons in and

around Cedar City became too great to contradict and national calls for justice too loud to

ignore, the Church stepped aside and allowed federal courts to try John D. Lee as the

mastermind of the attack. After two trials, Lee was convicted in 1876 and executed by

firing squad at the site of the massacre in 1877.56

Both Juanita Brooks' classic treatment of the Mountain Meadows Massacre and Walker, Turley,
and Leonard's more recent and more detailed account present convincing evidence that the hierarchy in
Salt Lake City was ignorant of the attack until after it occurred, and that Brigham Young specifically
ordered the southern Utah settlements to let all American emigrants pass unmolested (see Brooks, 63;
Walker, Turley, and Leonard, 182-85). Brooks' strongest argument is that Young was keenly aware of the
terrible repercussions, in the form of bad press and federal legal interference in the territory, would result
from any violence against Gentile settlers passing through the Utah territory (219). Both books also note
that while John D. Lee, who was executed for his part in the massacre in 1877, ended his life estranged
from the Church and condemned Young's leadership, he insisted throughout his life that Young did not
order the massacre and did not know it had been committed until after the fact (Brooks, 189; Walker,
Turley, and Leonard 228-29).
56
It seems clear that after gaining the prosecutor's promise that he would limit the scope of his
inquiry to Lee alone—leaving the church and its leaders out of it—that the church gave its full cooperation
during the second trial, which resulted in Lee's conviction. Mormon witnesses who had been unable to
remember the events of 1857 in the first trial were suddenly quite clear on the details of the massacre and
John D. Lee's full culpability for the event. See Brooks, 191-98. Walker, Turley, and Leonard do not
address the aftermath of the massacre or Lee's trials in 1875 and 1876, arguing that they could not
effectively cover the crime and the punishment in a single volume (xii).
 49

Despite the controversy over the massacre, the federal troops arrived and stayed

in Utah in relative piece. When they marched into Salt Lake City in the spring of 1858,

they found the settlement deserted. Brigham Young and Church leaders had orchestrated

a total evacuation of the city, vowing they would rather give the city up entirely than

submit to abuse at the hands of the United States government again.57 But with help from

a rare non-Mormon friend of the Saints, Colonel Thomas B. Kane, Brigham Young came

to an understanding with the federal commander and the new governor. The federally-

appointed territorial governor agreed not to meddle in the Church's affairs if the

Mormons treated him and the government with appropriate respect, and the federal troops

took up residence in a new fort established outside Salt Lake City where they could keep

an eye on the Mormons from a respectable distance. Young, however, retained immense

power in the territory that not even the governor could usurp.

From 1860 to 1865, the Civil War effectively distracted the nation from the

"Mormon problem" on the western frontier. Republican President Abraham Lincoln

entirely deprioritized the second relic of barbarism, polygamy, in his focus on the first,

and Brigham Young's theocratic kingdom was largely ignored for the duration of the

war. While Lincoln did sign the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act into law in 1862, he did

nothing to enforce it. In fact, instead of attempting to intervene in territorial business,

Lincoln's administration sought the Saints' cooperated in building a transcontinental

telegraph wire that passed through Utah and contracted with Young to equip and arm

Arrington, Brigham Young, 265-67.

 50

Mormon men to protect to the telegraph wire, overland mail routes, and even federal

troops to the extent that such protection was needed.58

Once the Civil War ended, however, the nation remembered polygamy. Even the

nation's most famous abolitionist, Harriet Beecher Stowe, joined in the hue and cry,

authoring critiques of plural marriage as the enslavement of women and calling for the

government to force an end to the practice.59 Further, Utah's unseemly disregard for

federal authority outraged the Reconstructionist Congress that was anxious to assert and

reinforce the power of the national government over the states and territories. But as the

Saints continued to control all elected offices in the territory, including the vast majority

of judges, and Mormons filled the juries, the federal government was unable to enforce

the Anti-Bigamy Act. When Brigham Young died in 1877, plural marriage was still a

flourishing institution in the Mormon kingdom.60

But even at its height in the middle and late decades of the nineteenth century,

plural marriage was neither the pervasive practice anti-Mormon crusaders claimed nor

the licentious hedonism that many Gentiles imagined it to be. Historians generally

agree—based on a wealth of documentary evidence including Church records and

Lincoln's lack of concern about the Mormons was so complete that he reportedly told a
Mormon emissary to the White House that when he was a boy clearing land on his father's farm,
"Occasionally we would come to a log that had fallen down. It was too hard to split, too wet to burn, and
too heavy to move, so we ploughed around it. That's what I intend to do with the Mormons. Tell Brigham
Young that if he will let me alone, I will let him alone." Quoted in Arrington and Bitton. See also Gary
Vitale, "Abraham Lincoln and the Mormons: Another Legacy of Limited Freedom," Journal of the Illinois
State Historical Society 101, no. 3-4 (Fall/Winter 2008), 260-71. Available online at
http://www.historvcooperative.org. Vitale's depiction of plural marriage is questionable, but he provides a
useful overview of Lincoln's relations with the Saints.
59
See Givens, Viper, 146-47.
60
For a detailed exploration of the nineteenth century conflicts over Mormon polygamy, see Sarah
Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century
America, Studies in Legal History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
 51

thousands of volumes of personal diaries, which were avidly kept by Mormons in this

period—that only twenty to thirty percent of Mormon adults were engaged in plural

marriages. l The majority of such marriages involved only two wives; the Church would

not allow a man to take more than one wife if he could not show that he could provide for

the additional wife and children. Men like Brigham Young who could care for dozens of

wives—and were in high demand as husbands for their spiritual as well as their temporal

worth—were not the norm.

The standoff between the Saints and the federal government continued until the

Edmunds Act of 1882 extended the earlier Anti-Bigamy Act, classifying polygamy as a

felony and punishing illegal cohabitation (which did not require authorities to prove that

a marriage had taken place) as a misdemeanor. The Edmunds Act further prohibited

individuals who supported the practice of plural marriage—regardless of whether or not

they were polygamists themselves—from holding political office, sitting on juries, and

voting. All elected offices in the territory were vacated and the federal government

installed a board to oversee new elections. While Utah residents were required to sign an

oath agreeing to uphold all laws of the United States (referring primarily, of course, to the

prohibition of polygamy), the Church instructed members to interpret the oath so

narrowly that they could in good conscience sign it: if, at the moment of signing the

pledge, they were not actively planning to enter into a plural marriage or support

someone else in doing so, the Church told members, then they could sign the oath.

61
See B. Carmon Hardy, Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage (Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 1992), 16-17.
62
See Arrington and Bitton, "Marriage and Family Patterns," 185-205.
 52

Having signed the oath, Church leaders argued, did not prevent members from deciding

later to support plural marriage. Thus, with Church sanction, the majority of Saints

signed the pledge and elected devout but non-polygamous Mormons to most territorial

offices, perpetuating the Church's control of the territory. But Mormons were effectively

banned from serving on juries, and convictions for polygamy skyrocketed. As a result,

most of the Church's leaders, including President John Taylor, went into hiding.

Thwarted by what they saw as Mormon duplicity against their efforts to take total

control of Utah, Congress responded with the 1887 Tucker Amendment to the Edmunds

Act. Now, any man who claimed membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day

Saints would lose the right to vote. Women—who had been granted suffrage by the

territorial government in Utah, but who had not fulfilled national hopes by voting to

"liberate" themselves from the enslavement of polygamy—lost the right to vote

altogether.64 And Congress finally set its sights on the Church itself, seizing all Church

funds and property in excess of $50,000, placing the Church in receivership, and halting

all of the Church's substantial support for immigrating foreign converts. Utah school

laws, which originally had been designed to support the ward-based school system, were

suspended, and all schools were placed under the control of the territorial Supreme Court

Larson.
64
More than eighty percent of the Utah population was Mormon at this point; the Edmunds-
Tucker Act effectively handed the state over to control of a small minority of Gentile (non-Mormon)
residents (Larson).
 53

and a federally-appointed commissioner. The federal Secretary of the Interior was given

the power to dispose of all of the Church's financial resources to fund the schools.65

President John Taylor died in hiding in 1887. His successor Wilford Woodruff

assumed the role of President and Prophet while on the underground himself, inheriting

the unenviable task of trying to hold the Church together while evading arrest on charges

of polygamy. Once the Church's legal challenges to the Edmunds Act and the Edmunds-

Tucker Act were exhausted, Woodruffs counselors began to discuss the possibility that

in order for the Church to survive, the Saints would have to abandon plural marriage. At

first, Woodruff staunchly refused, although he agreed to suspend the sealing of new

plural marriages for the time being. But in September 1890, after extensive prayer on the

subject and with the full consent of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, he issued his

Manifesto, which states in part:

Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural

marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court
of last resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws, and to
use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to
have them do likewise.

There is nothing in my teachings to the Church or in those of my

associates, during the time specified, which can be reasonably construed to
inculcate or encourage polygamy; and when any Elder of the Church has
used language which appeared to convey any such teaching, he has been
promptly reproved. And I now publicly declare that my advice to the
Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by
the law of the land.66

Arrington and Bitton, Larson. For an extended discussion of the constitutionality of

congressional legislation and judicial rulings on the questions surrounding Mormon polygamy in the
nineteenth century, see Gordon, The Mormon Question.
66 "official Declaration—1," Doctrine and Covenants. Online at http://scriptures.lds.org/.
 54

The Church voted to sustain the Manifesto in October of 1890. In short order Woodruff

also dismantled the Church's economic cooperatives; ceded control of the school system

to the territorial government; and eliminated the Church's political arm, the People's

Party, encouraging members to join one of the two national parties. The Mormon

kingdom of God was at an end.

In the aftermath of the Church's apparent capitulation to political and cultural

pressures—and the Mormon leaders' encouragement of members to support the party that

had made such a valiant effort to destroy their faith—it did not take long for a

Republican-dominated Congress to deliver statehood.67 In 1896, Utah entered the Union

as the forty-fifth state. The Mormons' "Americanization" seemed complete. And yet the

state seal, which served as the image for the state's official flag, combines an American

eagle holding a draped American flag with a golden beehive, over which is emblazoned

the word "industry." The state seal was a visible sign that the Mormons may have been

forced to give up their Kingdom of Deseret, but they had not forgotten or discarded many

of the ideals on which it was founded. They continued to revere the peculiar religious

beliefs and practices revealed by their founder. Polygamy continued in secret for decades

among the highest echelons of the Church, and after the Church was totally rid of the

practice so-called Mormon fundamentalists kept it alive in practice and in the American

67
Mormon oral traditions include stories of congregations that were divided by local leaders
between the national political parties, with members seated on one side of the building told to join one
party and those on the other side to join the other (Arrington and Bitton; Larson). Such stories illustrate
church leaders' intention to prove to the nation that they did not tell members how to vote by delivering
significant numbers of voters to each party. But in short order Woodruff and most of the Apostles were
openly supporting the Republicans, and where the leaders went the majority of members followed. The
Republican Party, which had so long opposed the management of individuals' political decisions by the
church, was only too pleased to benefit from Woodruffs support once they had achieved the official
separation of church and state and end to polygamy that they had so long sought from the Saints. See
Larson.
 55

imagination. Finally, Church leaders remained heavily involved in members' political,

economic, and social affairs to an extent that looked blatantly theocratic to critics. The

Mormons' stubborn adherence to such beliefs and behaviors nurtured the negative

stereotypes about them that persisted throughout the twentieth century.

 56

Chapter 2

Frontiers: Mormonism at the Edge of American Culture, 1890-1917

Church President Wilford Woodruffs 1890 Manifesto promised to obey federal

authority by ending plural marriage and seemed to give non-Mormon Americans what

they had been clamoring for. But the vast majority of Americans continued to regard the

Latter-day Saints with suspicion and disapproval. Polygamy had never been the only

aspect of Mormonism that disturbed the American public and the Manifesto did little to

end their fears. The Church also dissolved its political party and surrendered the

territorial school system to the United States government, but Americans' continued to

view the Latter-day Saints as deviating from acceptable religious, political, and social

beliefs and practices. In the eyes of most, the Mormons remained a group of deluded

fools, practicing (now hidden) sexual immoralities under the direction of a theocratic

tyranny that ruled all aspects of individual Mormons' lives using threats of violence,

financial ruin, and eternal damnation.

After the Saints sustained Woodruffs Manifesto, non-Mormon Americans

represented Mormons with the same images that were popular throughout the nineteenth

century. Mormons continued to appear in religious propaganda, short stories, novels,

histories, and journalism as credulous fools hewing to implausible religious doctrine,

lecherous polygamous elders and their terrorized plural wives, dangerous fanatics sworn

to eliminate the priesthood's opposition, and power-mad tyrants ruling over a theocratic

kingdom in the West and the puppets whose lives they controlled. Further, as Terryl L.
 57

Givens shows in The Viper on the Hearth, the lines between genres were blurred.1

Newspapers routinely turned for information to fictional texts, and to histories and
t •}

scholarly studies whose motives and assertions were obviously questionable. Novels

were advertised as "high-class fiction" that promised "authentic first-hand information of

life among the rural Mormons." But most of these novels provided fully fictional

depictions of the Saints that reinforced existing stereotypes. At the turn of the twentieth

century, non-Mormons viewed Mormons as they had for decades, and the circle of

mutually-reinforcing and generally biased sources remained largely unbroken.

Depictions of Mormons generally perpetuated stereotypes during this period, but

there was a new emphasis in the years immediately before World War I on the Saints'

contributions to and fulfillment of American ideals. When all of the land within the

United States' borders was sufficiently populated to warrant the official closing of the

American frontier after the census of 1890—which coincided with the Mormons'

capitulation to the nation's legal and social demands—it became increasingly difficult for

Americans to think of the nation in terms of the civilized East and the uncivilized West.

As Congress granted the Western territories statehood one by one, the Latter-day Saints
1
The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 108-120.
2
In 1902, a reviewer for The New York Times compared a new book on Mormonism to what he
regarded as the extraordinarily high standard set a few months earlier by William Alexander Linn's The
Story of the Mormons: From the Date of Their Origin to the Year 1901 (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1902). Online at http ://books. google, com/. The reviewer does note that some of the data
presented in the new book "escaped Mr. Linn in a quite unaccountable manner," but Linn's failure to
analyze all available information did not lead the reviewer to temper his approbation. John White
Chadwick, "The Mormon Prophet: I. Woodbridge Riley's New Psychological Study of Joseph Smith, Jr.,
the Founder of Mormonism," New York Times, September 20, 1902. Unless otherwise noted, all newspaper
citations in this chapter are from the Proquest Historical Newspaper Database. Accessed via the Boston
University Libraries, online at http://www.bu.edu/libraries.
3
Advertisement for JerdCless by Pearl Bailey (New York: Cochrane Publishing Co., 1909), New
York Times, October 22, 1909.
 58

were no longer separated from non-Mormon Americans by their territorial status or their

lack of representation in the national government. Increased interaction, fostered by the

transcontinental telegraph that the Mormons helped build in the 1860s and the

transcontinental railroad that they helped complete in the 1870s, combined with

increasing Gentile settlement in the former Kingdom of Deseret to allow more non-

Mormons than ever before to rub elbows—and ideas—with their Mormon neighbors. The

Saints, too, facilitated this increasing familiarity. They sent out missionaries in increasing

numbers to foreign fields and to every part of the United States and used national events

to highlight the community's tangible contributions to nation-building through their

transformation of Western deserts into productive farmland. By the time revolutionaries

began attacking Mormon settlements in northern Mexico in 1910, non-Mormon

Americans were willing to put talk of polygamy and priestly control aside as the nation

rallied to protect "American Mormons" living on what appeared to be the country's

dwindling political, cultural, and physical frontiers.

Religion: "That Abomination on American Soil"4

Behind all non-Mormon discussions of the Latter-day Saints in this period is the

assumption that Mormon religious beliefs are so wrong and even ridiculous that

Mormonism cannot and should not be taken seriously. Whereas by this point many

American Protestants were comfortable recognizing fellow Protestants of various

denominations as being on an acceptable—and certainly Christian—religious path, and

4
"Some New Publications," review of John Fletcher Hurst, Short History of the Christian Church
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893), New York Times, February 6, 1893.
 59

there were even growing arguments against the pervasive anti-Catholicism that had for so

long characterized American culture, almost no one was willing to acknowledge any truth

or even any reasonable appeal in Mormonism. Americans of all ages recognized this, as

evidenced by The New York Times report of one child's bedtime prayer: "O Lord, help

me not to branch off into any other religion. Help me always to be a good Presbyterian

and not a Mormon or anything like that."5 Scholars of religion in the United States did

not count Mormonism among the varieties of Christianity.6 Most observers agreed that

Mormonism was simply not a valid religion.

Critiques of Mormon religious beliefs began and often ended with the founding

Prophet Joseph Smith Jr. Latter-day Saint religion depends on Smith's role as a Prophet

of God, and Smith's voluminous revelations provide the core framework of Mormon

belief and practice. At the turn of the twentieth century, Non-Mormon discussions of

Mormonism focused on proving the falsity of Smith's claims and the scurrilous

motivations behind his words and actions. The most vigorous objections to Smith's

religion focused on the Book of Mormon. As Smith's first revealed work, it served as the

primary evidence of his prophetic calling. As historian William Alexander Linn noted, "If

the fraudulent character of the alleged revelation to Smith of the golden plates can be

5
"Still Sound," New York Times, August 26, 1894. The boy's father was the president of a
Presbyterian college, and shared this story to prove that he governed his family and his college with
orthodox Presbyterian principles.
6
Leonard Woolsey Bacon, for example, in A History of Christianity in America, "naturally
exclude[s]" the Latter-day Saints from the total number of American Christians when he enumerates
religious groups in the U. S. based on census data, as they are "only nominally" such. (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1898), xxxiii. Online at http://books.google.com/.
 60

established, the foundation of the whole scheme crumbles."7 Discussions of the "Mormon

Bible" seldom engaged the book's contents, examining instead the story of its discovery,

translation, and publication. Newspaper coverage depended neither on scholarly expertise

nor fresh information: in one case, several versions of the same article were published at

least four times in different newspapers during the 1890s. The article, presented as an

interview with a man who lived in Palmyra, New York, during the late 1820s, described

the years when Smith began publicly speaking of his discovery of the Book of Mormon

and gathering converts. Daniel Hendrix was considered a reliable and unbiased source

because he did not convert. He represented "Joe Smith" as "the raggedest, laziest fellow

in the place," albeit a "good talker" and a "romancer of the first water" blessed with a

"fertile imagination." The article detailed the young Smith's treasure-digging, regarding

the practice as evidence both of the origins of the idea for his "gold bible" and of

superstitious practices hardly in keeping with proper religion. It also neatly undermined

Smith's prophetic role by declaring that he merely identified the gold plates as a valuable

treasure until early convert Sidney Rigdon arrived in Palmyra, when Smith suddenly
Q

began speaking of the plates' religious significance. Hendrix's recounting of all this

7
The Story of the Mormons, vi. This is same book that New York Times reviewer John White
Chadwick praised even as he acknowledged Linn's inexplicable failure to include important and readily
available data (see note 2).
For more on theories of the authorship of the Book of Mormon and the history of the text's
reception in the United States, see Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That
Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Givens discusses the
Spaulding theory in detail on 159-61.
8
Many historians—then and now—agree that Sidney Rigdon did not join Smith's new church
until missionaries traveling through Ohio, where he was the minister in a Campbellite congregation,
converted him after the publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830. There is no reliable historical evidence
that Rigdon knew of Smith or the Book of Mormon prior to 1830, or that he in any way influenced the
discovery, translation, or publication of the text. See Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Utah, 1540-1887
(San Francisco, CA: The History Company, Publishers, 1890), 75-77; Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith
 61

"absurdity" culminated in observations about Smith's converts: they were not merely

religious followers, but financial backers. Smith's new religion was particularly

successful, he asserted, among "unsophisticated farmers" who willingly sold their

property and committed the proceeds "to the care of Joe Smith." Thus the Book of

Mormon was a fraud used to dupe foolish men into delivering their money over to Smith

and his fellow priests—and, for good measure, Smith was not even the brains behind the

outfit.9

A spate of books on the Book of Mormon appeared just after the turn of the

century in the aftermath of controversy over Utah's election of a polygamous church

elder to the House of Representatives. In some cases, like Enos T. Hall's The Mormon

Bible—A Fabrication and a Stupendous Fraud, readers did not need to read in order to

understand.10 Others, like the Reverend M. T. Lamb's The Mormons and Their Bible,

analyzed and refuted the book's content. While he first addressed the discovery of the

text in a chapter on "The Authenticity of the Book of Mormon," Lamb went on to explain

the book's incompatibility with the Bible and with scientific and historical evidence. But

any assessment of the Book of Mormon had to deal with Joseph Smith, and as if to

emphasize Smith's relative unimportance in the production and ongoing prominence of

the book, pictures of Sidney Rigdon and Brigham Young precede Smith in Lamb's book.

When Smith does appear, he sports the full military regalia he wore as the General of the

and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 121; and Givens, By the
Hand of Mormon, 71, 160.
9
"Joe's Golden Bible: True Story of the Discovery of the Book of Mormon," Chicago Daily
Tribune, June 17, 1894; "Smith's Mormon Bible: The Story of Its Finding Told by a Contemporary of the
Mormon Prophet," New York Times, July 15, 1895; and "How Mormonism Began: Recollections of One
Who Knew Joe Smith at Palmyra, N.Y.," Chicago Daily Tribune, May 2, 1897, reprint from New York Sun.
10
Advertisement, New York Times, April 28, 1905.
 62

Nauvoo Legion in the 1840s. Clearly Lamb wanted readers to understand that Smith was

a man primarily dedicated to this-worldly concerns, hardly in keeping with what

Americans expected of a self-proclaimed prophet of God. "

Latter-day Saint scriptures were often treated as just one aspect of the larger

problem of Mormon belief in ongoing revelation because, as one commentator declared,

in Mormonism new revelations "supplant both the Bible and its own 'Book of Mormon'
10

as divine authority." Not surprisingly, the revelation most often debated in this period

was Wilford Woodruffs Manifesto. The immediate reaction to the Manifesto was mixed,

although most were willing to believe that the Saints were genuinely giving up plural

marriage. Non-Mormons saw no divine providence in the act, nor did they acknowledge

that the Church leaders did: "The Mormon leaders have shown mere worldly good sense

and prudence in deciding to surrender the bone of contention." Such revelations "have the

useful quality, in common with the deliverances of the Pope and the decisions of the

Supreme Court, of being susceptible to modification." According to this assessment, the

real value of this "religious imposture" was to give the priesthood "mastery of the daily
•I T

lives of [the church's] members." Woodruffs claim that he had spoken with Joseph

Smith and Brigham Young proved, according to non-Mormons, "the depth of superstition

into which Mormonism ha[d] fallen."14

11
Philadelphia, PA: The Griffith and Rowland Press, 1901. Online at http://www.archive.org.
Image of Joseph Smith on page 66.
12
"Desecrates Records in Mormon Temple," New York Times, September 17, 1911.
13
Editorial, New York Times, October 7, 1890.
14
Editorial, New York Times, October 6, 1890. See also "With Brigham Young's Spirit: President
Woodruff of the Mormons Claims to Have Talked with Him," Chicago Daily Tribune, October 5, 1890.
 63

Critics often treated the Saints' claims of revelation as a joke that seriously

undermined the credibility of the religion. In 1891, the Chicago Daily Tribune mocked

Joseph Smith's use of seeing stones to find lost objects in the years before he produced

the Book of Mormon.15 Two years later the Tribune reported the story of a group of non-

Mormons who claimed to have experienced a spectral vision in the 1840s that presaged

the beginning of the Civil War. The Mormons, according to the report, later claimed the

vision for themselves in an effort to bolster their own prophetic claims.16 After the turn of

the century, during the congressional investigation of Latter-day Saint Apostle Reed

Smoot's election to the Senate, Church President Joseph F. Smith made headlines when

he reaffirmed to the Saints his belief in ongoing revelation in spite of having declared to

Congress, "I have had impressions of the spirit on my mind frequently, but they are not

revelations."17 Smith had tried to avoid admitting a religious belief that he knew was

regarded as ignorant and superstitious—and thus as evidence of Smoot's (or any

Mormon's) unfitness to hold political office.

Observers generally assessed rank-and-file Mormons as ignorant, credulous, and

fanatical. How else to explain their adherence to so irrational and superstitious a system

of belief, or their obedience to a priesthood who so clearly manipulated that system to

dominate their subjects? In an editorial entitled "Mormon Superstition and Humbug," the

15
"Joseph Smith's 'Seeing Stone': A Green Pebble That the Mormon Prophet Credited with a
Wondrous Property," Chicago Daily Tribune, February 28, 1891.
16
"In Figures of Fire: Tongues of Flame Form '1861' upon a Midnight Sky," April 16, 1893.
17
"Mormons' Head a Perjurer: President Smith Owns Up to False Testimony to Senators,"
Chicago Daily Tribune, March 20, 1905. See also "Smith Gets Revelations: Mormon Chief, However,
Would Not Say So to Senate Committee," New York Times, March 20, 1905, which quotes Smith
extensively but does not label his changing story perjury. For the New York Times, the bigger issue (as
evidenced by the headline) is that Smith confirmed Mormon belief in continuing revelation.
 64

writer described how the "gaping audience" listened as Mormon Apostles proclaimed at

conference in Salt Lake City that they could resurrect the dead. This single event

illustrated "the ignorance, credulity, and superstition of the Mormon laity" and proved

"that Mormonism can make no progress except among the densely ignorant." Such

characteristics damned the Saints to the most odious religious comparison current in

nineteenth-century American culture: "The Mormons are fully as ignorant, as

superstitious, as slavishly priest-ridden as the Canadian Catholics of Quebec."19 Not only

were they as bad as Catholics—they were as bad as foreign, non-English-speaking

Catholics. Clearly such ignorant people could not be trusted to participate freely in a

democractic society.

Journalists, historians, and fiction writers in this period seldom discussed unique

Mormon practices as opposed to beliefs—in part because most of the Saints' practices

did not differ widely from most American Christians. One oft-noted exception was the

ritual of baptism for the dead, which non-Mormons mercilessly ridiculed. As one article

declared in its first line, "The Mormons are even adding dead Kentuckians to their

faith." Americans particularly enjoyed stories of celebrities the Saints' were rumored to

have baptized by proxy. According to one lecturer, the Saints not only baptized President

Theodore Roosevelt's whole family and sealed them to him, but also added several famed

18
Chicago Daily Tribune, October 7, 1891.
19
"Let Utah Wait Awhile," reprint from Portland Oregonian, Chicago Daily Tribune, July 5,
1891.
20
"Mormons Recruit from Grave: Services Over the Bones of a Woman Long Dead Admit Her to
the Faith in Kentucky," Chicago Daily Tribune, January 23, 1899. The article treated the ceremony as a
conversion. The writer either did not know or chose not to explain that Mormons regard the ceremony of
baptism by proxy not as forcing the deceased into the church, but rather as giving him or her the
opportunity to choose to become a Mormon in the afterlife.
 65

91

past queens to his posthumous marital bed. It is hard not hear a wry grin in this story of

the President's polygamous afterlife, especially given the fact that it was reported by a

Democratic newspaper. As with many stories of Mormon beliefs, this one served to

discredit both the Saints and another object of the writer's disapproval.

This connection of Mormon baptism with death was sometimes carried well

beyond actual Latter-day Saint belief and practice, as in The New York Times' front page

coverage of a living convert's outdoor baptism in 1901. The article described the

convert—a "frail girl"—responding "listlessly" and "spiritlessly" to the instructions of

the male elders overseeing the ceremony. The clear implication is that the girl was not

entirely happy about joining her new community, or perhaps was not doing so of her own

volition. The article further noted that "[tjheir way lay through the broad central roadway

of a cemetery. The women looked about at the tombstones." With this brief but trenchant

description of the setting, the writer transformed the traditional ceremony of Christian

rebirth into a funeral. The Mormons were guilty not only of ridiculous but of eternally

dangerous beliefs.

Writers routinely assigned Morons an affinity with other undesirable minorities.

Several articles during this period connected them with poor, ill-educated white

Southerners whose supposed violence and bigotry drew significant press after the Civil

21
"Call Roosevelt a Mormon: Magazine Writers Talk of His Baptism by Proxy," New York Times,
May 23, 1911. The lecturer quoted in the article is apostate Frank J. Cannon, a former Senator from Utah
and the son of George Q. Cannon, a member of the First Presidency of the church from 1880 to 1901.
22
"Mormons Baptize a Convert in the Bay: Trembling Girl Immersed after Receiving the Elders'
Greeting," July 5, 1901.
 66

War. Mormons were routinely reported to be recruiting among the most ignorant and

least respectable Southerners. According to one article published in both New York and

Chicago, in the mountains of western North Carolina the people's illiteracy prevented

them from studying the Bible for themselves (as all good Protestants should). As a result

"they bec[a]me indifferent, or else gr[e]w fanatical on unessentials in faith and creed.

They therefore provide[d] responsive material for Mormon missionaries."24 Another

article asserted that the fact that Mormons gained some three-quarters of their North

Carolina converts among mountain people proved that in that section of the country
9S

"[ijgnorance [wa]s rife and morality at a low ebb."

Such credulity and superstition were not limited to ill-educated Southerners. In a

celebration of modern scientific thinking, some noted that the religious fanaticism that

observers saw in Mormons was an inherently human quality. In short, some people will

believe anything: "The success of Joe Smith and his fellow-conspirators was due to the

fact that they worked upon the credulity and superstition of men and women—that

extraordinary weakness of human nature to accept everything which is mysterious, extra-

In The "Americanization" of Utah for Statehood (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1971),
Gustive O. Larson notes the frequent comparison of the rebellious attitude of Utah Mormons toward federal
authority to that of Southern "seceshes." This comparison was hardly idle, he argues, giving Congress the
justification it wanted to treat the Utah territory much as it had the un-Reconstructed post-Civil War South.
Such comparisons condemned both parties: the Mormons for spreading their dangerous doctrines and the
Southerners for accepting this fraudulent religion.
24
"Of Interest from Exchanges: North Carolina's 500,000 Illiterates—Good Chance to Introduce
the French School System for Adults," Chicago Daily Tribune, May 21, 1898. Reprinted from New York
Times.
25
"Bad As Barbarians: Peculiar Traffic among the Mountains of North Carolina," Chicago Daily
Tribune, June 12, 1892. Mormon missionaries were also reported to target ignorant and superstitious
populations overseas—peasants and laborers in Europe, and native populations in Australia, New Zealand,
and the Pacific.
 67

human, and unbelievable and believe it." This all-too-human devotion to irrational ways

of thinking amounted to mental instability. As Western historian Hubert Howe Bancroft

explained, "All very religious people [...] are partially insane. This insanity may be
97

passive and harmless, or aggressive and hurtful." For some Mormon believers—all of

whom must have had some underlying instability, or they would not have been Mormons

in the first place—this irrational faith could lead to a complete breakdown. One such case

made the front page of The New York Times in 1901: "Mormon Instructor Insane: He Had

Fasted and Prayed for Three Days, Hoping for Divine Aid in Solving Mechanical

Problem."28 Belief in ongoing revelation was, then, dangerous not only to your eternal

salvation, but also to your health in this world.

More sympathetic observers used psychological theories to credit Joseph Smith

with some measure of sincerity while still undermining the religious system he founded

by labeling him insane. Reviewers interpreted such theories as a "vindication of

Mormonism."29 In this spirit of generosity they described Lily Dougall's novel The

Mormon Prophet as "In a New Vein." 30 Dougall's stated intention was to show readers

that there was more to Mormonism than polygamy and that Joseph Smith was not simply

a crook.31 Instead, she portrayed Smith as an illiterate man who experiences "sundry

"The Mormon Delusion," editorial, Chicago Daily Tribune, June 19, 1894.
27
History of Utah, 371.
28
January 27, 1901. The Chicago Daily Tribune reported the incident under the headline "Mind Is
Wrecked by Study: University of Utah Instructor, Graduate of Cook County Normal, Insane from Fasting,
Prayer, and Mechanics," January 28, 1901."
29
"Two Volumes of Reminiscences by the Rev. H. R. Haweis," review of Travel and Talk by Rev.
H. R. Haweis (publication info not provided), Chicago Daily Tribune, December 30, 1896.
30
"Among the New Books: Lily Dougall's 'Mormon Prophet' Is in a New Vein," rev. of The
Mormon Prophet by Lily Dougall (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1899), Chicago Daily Tribune,
April 24, 1899.
31
Dougall, v-vii.
 68

flashes of genius" over which he had no control.32 His unpredictable powers of insight,

combined with a remarkable force of character, made his religious persuasion nearly

irresistible to potential converts whose minds were already confused or deranged. While

Dougall portrayed Smith as deluded and often not in control of his actions, she finally

condemned him for the ambition she said drove his religious quest from the beginning

and for the excesses that characterized his life and his community (especially plural

marriage) in the end in Nauvoo. Dougall's defense, in spite of her good intentions,

undermined Mormonism and its believers by arguing that the founding prophet "was

genuinely deluded by the automatic freaks of a vigorous but undisciplined brain, and that,

yielding to these, he became confirmed in the hysterical temperament which always adds

to delusion self-deception, and to self-deception half-conscious fraud."

I. Woodbridge Riley's 1903 psychological biography of Smith, based on research

completed during his graduate studies at Yale (a point emphasized in reviews and

advertisements of the book), agreed with Dougall in that he believed Smith's career was

inspired and defined by mental instability.34 But where Dougall pictured Smith as

somewhat hapless, Riley described him as a megalomaniac whose ambitions were shaped

by both a family history of mental illness and the unsettled social and religious conditions

of his society. According to Riley, all of Smith's prophetic experiences—both private

revelations and public visions and miracles—resulted from an unconscious ability to

32
Dougall, 352.
33
vii.
34
The Founder of Mormonism: A Psychological Biography of Joseph Smith, Jr., with an
introductory preface by Professor George Trumbull Ladd (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Company, 1903).
Online at http://books.google.com/.
 69

induce self-hypnosis and to inspire mass "hypnotic hallucination[s]." Throughout his

career, Riley argued, Smith purposefully used the abilities that sprang from his mental

illness to build himself an empire and make himself rich. In the end, whether the

explanation was simple fraud or psychological abnormality, non-Mormon Americans

writers and readers dismissed the Saints as a group of self-aggrandizing leaders imposing

on credulous fools with convenient revelations and superstitious rituals.

Polygamy: The Last Relic of Barbarism

Most representations of Mormonism in this period placed polygamy at the center

of Mormon religion and society. While many observers accepted the Manifesto as

sincere, skeptics urged a wait-and-see policy. Many believed that the Church was not

really relinquishing polygamy but rather playing possum and taking plural marriage
•j/r

underground. Anti-polygamy activists supported this argument by pointing to the

ongoing migration of a small number of polygamous Saints to Canada and Mexico—

beyond the reach of the United States government. The recognition of Utah as a state,

the naysayers argued, would give the numerically dominant Mormons the power to

On Smith's "auto-hypnosis," see chapter 6, "Prophet, Seer, and Revelator." On the shared
hallucinations of believers, see chapter 7, "Joseph the Occultist."
36
"Mormon Reform Pretenses," editorial, Chicago Daily Tribune, October 8,1890.
37
Both The New York Times and the Chicago Daily Tribune printed dozens of articles on Mormon
emigration to Mexico and Canada in this period. In general, they regarded Canada sympathetically, as in
agreement with the United States on the issue of polygamy (see "The Mormon Evil in Canada," New York
Times, January 17, 1890, and "Spread of Graft Stirs Up Canada: [...] Protestants in Alberta Grow Uneasy
Watching Long Strides of Mormons," Chicago Daily Tribune, June 23, 1907). They represented Mexico,
on the other hand, as allowing Mormons to do as they pleased out of a desire to attract settlers with a
demonstrated ability to develop the land (see "Without Prejudice," New York Times, August 14, 1898, and
"Mormonism Spreading in Mexico: Rapid Colonization Where Plural Marriage Is Permitted," Chicago
Daily Tribune, February 2, 1902).
 70

define and enforce marriage laws within the state, at which time they would bring

polygamy back out into the open.

Some suspected not only that the Mormons were exporting plural marriage, but

also that they continued the practice in secret within the nation's borders. Reports out of

Utah accused the Saints both of permitting ongoing marital relations between men and

the plural wives they had taken before 1890 and of sealing new plural marriages in direct

violation of the Manifesto. While in fact many Mormon men remained married to the

wives they wedded before the Manifesto and a small number of new polygamous

marriages were sealed in secret during this period, reports of the prevalence of the

practice were wildly exaggerated. One writer asserted that "at least a thousand

polygamous wives have given birth [in Utah] in the last year." Detractors maintained

that while the sealing of new marriages could not be proven, that was not because they

were not taking place but because the Church was so skilled at keeping secrets. By these

standards, rumor and unsupported suspicion were sufficient evidence of the Saints'

continuing defiance of American social norms and the federal government's laws. No

matter what Church leaders said, many Americans believed the Saints persisted in their

law-breaking ways. Any hint of continued support of and participation in plural

marriages—old or new—signaled the Mormons' disregard for the government and for the

approbation of the majority of Americans.

"Mormon Church Treachery: Leaders in a Political Fight Again Despite Recent Promises—
Practice of Polygamy," Chicago Daily Tribune, December 5, 1897. Such reports of conditions on the
ground in Utah often cite the Salt Lake Tribune which was, at this time, a vigorously anti-Mormon paper,
established to give Utah Gentiles an alternative to the Church's Deseret News.
 71

The response to Utah's election of Brigham H. Roberts to the House of

Representatives in 1898 clearly demonstrated the popular perception of plural marriage

as rebellion against the nation. Even before the election, newspapers around the nation

carried the story that "an unconverted polygamist"—"a law brea[k]er who should be in

prison instead of politics"—would soon be elected in Utah.39 Roberts, who remained

married to all three of the wives he wedded before the 1890 Manifesto, was "living in

open violation of the law" and was therefore unfit "to take part in the manufacture of the

Nation's laws."40 But his ongoing polygamy was not simply illegal; it was disloyal. One

writer declared that Roberts represented the high-ranking members of the priesthood who

sought to establish a theocratic empire independent of the United States.41 This amounted

to the breach of a sacred agreement with the nation. Reform groups thus labeled Roberts

a "covenant breaker" for continuing a practice that the Mormons had solemnly promised

the nation that they would abandon.42 The Mormons, as a group, were also accused of

breaking this covenant with the United States by sanctioning Roberts' illegal lifestyle

with their votes. His election—a victory for the "polygamous and law-defying

element"—so alarmed the Chicago Daily Tribune that it ran a seven-part expose on the

dangers Mormonism posed to the country, showing readers that ongoing polygamy was a

"Polygamist Up for Congress: Candidate Roberts' Two Wives Present Him with Heirs within a
Few Days of Each Other," Chicago Daily Tribune, November 7, 1898.
40
"Topics of the Times," New York Times, December 31, 1898.
41
David Utter, "Destiny of Mormonism: Renunciation of Polygamy Presages Early Decay,"
Chicago Daily Tribune, February 19, 1899.
42
"The Fight against Roberts," New York Times, January 21, 1899. The label stuck. See "Roberts
As Covenant-Breaker," editorial, New York Times, November 5, 1899.
 72

symptom of the authority of the priesthood over the Mormon people and their votes.

The real problem presented by polygamy was that the people of Utah displayed no

commitment to individual freedom but continued to follow the dictates of the Church

hierarchy over and above their government and their fellow Americans: "Priestcraft, the

domination of the church in politics, is the great menace[.]"44 With the overwhelming

force of public opinion against him the House voted to expel Roberts.

While polygamy represented a problem of political defiance, many Americans

were far more concerned about the immorality of one man taking multiple wives. While

politicians and editorialists debated the most effective means of controlling the Church in

the legal and political spheres, readers and reformers cried out on behalf of women

enslaved as plural wives and the moral health of the nation. Reformers agitated at the

local and national levels for an anti-polygamy amendment to the Constitution, and

readers used the nation's editorial pages to express their outrage.45 The nation's editors

cottoned on to readers' demands for good Christian values, as with the Chicago Daily

Tribune's reprint of an article from the Boston Globe that lamented the fact that

Americans only paid attention to the problem of polygamy when it intruded into the

political sphere. The article called for polygamy to be addressed "through concerted

"Polygamy Once Again Threatens the Nation," Chicago Daily Tribune, April 23, 1899. The
untitled section on Roberts is headed by a large illustration of the representative-elect alongside separate
drawings of "Wife N° 1," "Wife N° 2," and "Wife N° 3." In addition the article includes sections on the
centrality of polygamy in Mormon doctrine, the remarkable success of missions in expanding the church,
and the church's ongoing building projects as evidence both of growth and the leaders' financial control
over the community.
44
"The Real Mormon Question," editorial, New York Times, December 17, 1899, reprint from the
Denver (CO) Post.
45
"Anti-Polygamy Amendments," Chicago Daily Tribune, February 26, 1899; "The Presbyterian
Assembly," New York Times, May 22, 1901; "Brutum Fulmen," editorial, New York Times, February 5,
1903; R. B. Watrous, "Strikes Blow at Polygamy," Chicago Daily Tribune, May 18, 1911.
 73

Christian effort."46 Thus plural marriage remained a powerful tool for rallying average

non-Mormon citizens concerned for the sexual immorality and degradation of women

they saw embodied in plural marriage.

Proving the truism that "sex sells," turn-of-the century writers in every medium

turned allegations of Mormon sexual deviance into big business. One of the most

popular—and titillating—plotlines was that the Mormon priesthood instituted and

enforced plural marriage to serve their own lusts. Treatments of Joseph Smith frequently

blamed his unbridled passions for his revelation on celestial marriage. Those passions led

him to seek converts most avidly among young women, to send men on long missions to

gain access to their pretty fiancees, and to imprison women until they agreed to marry

him.47 Writers also cited Smith's indulgence of his lust and his desire to keep those

indulgences secret as the impetus for excommunicating members who talked too much

and attacking apostate Mormons and Gentile neighbors who sought to expose him.48

Tales set among the Mormons after Smith's death continued such representations,

casting Brigham Young as the Polygamist-in-Chief. A representative short story

published in 1900, depicted a Mormon mother's heartbreaking struggle to overcome her

horror on hearing that Young revealed her daughter must become the plural wife of a

"Polygamy under the Stars and Stripes," in "Of Interest from Exchanges," January 23, 1899.
47
The climax of Dougall's The Mormon Prophet is the heroine's escape from Nauvoo when, after
years of faithful service to the community, she discovers that Smith intended to take her as a plural wife
from the moment he laid eyes on her, prior to her conversion, in the earliest days of the church at Palmyra.
In Harry Leon Wilson's The Lions of the Lord(Boston, MA: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., 1903) begins
with the main character's return from a long mission, only to discover that Smith sent him away in order to
court the man's betrothed.
48
See, for example, Linn, 188-94, 268-70, 290-96.
 74

much older priest.49 Numerous Western novels published after 1900 share a plotline in

which a handsome Gentile rides into town and tries to save a lovely young woman from a

forced polygamous marriage. The heroine of Mara, a 1902 book intended for Sunday

School audiences, marries a kind older man only to discover well after she moves to his

home in Utah that he is a Mormon and a polygamist.50 After 1910, silent films like The

Mormon, A Victim of the Mormons, and two versions of the Sherlock Holmes mystery A

Study in Scarlet exploited the theme for moviegoers.51 In every case, women were

subjugated to the evil machinations of Mormon priests.

The moral of many such stories was simple: no one was safe from the Mormons.

Two Mormons from Muddlety, a short novel published in 1897, featured missionaries

from Utah working in the backwoods of West Virginia among just the sort of ignorant

folk who non-Mormon Americans believed were particularly susceptible to Mormon

religion. The missionaries prey on a discontented young woman often left alone by her

husband in their isolated cabin. While the bride is not foolish enough to be taken in by the

Mormons' religious overtures, she allows their visits because she is lonely and because

they make themselves useful around the house. The author intended the story as a

comedy, but things quickly turn dark when the girl refuses one missionary's advances

and he threatens to drag her to Utah by force. Only her husband's timely arrival saves the

49
Mrs. J. K. Hudson, "A Mormon Proposition of Marriage," New York Times, January 7, 1900.
Reprint from New Lippincott magazine.
50
Pansy (Mrs. G. K. Alden), Mara (Boston, MA: Lothrop Publishing Company, 1902). Online at
http://books.google.com/. On the book's place in Sunday School libraries, see Stephenson Browne, "Boston
Notes," review of Mara by Pansy and Lions of the Lordby Harry Leon Wilson , New York Times, June 27,
1903, and "Two Books for Young People," Chicago Daily Tribune, August 14, 1903.
51
Allan Dwan, dir., The Mormon (USA: Motion Picture Distributors and Sales Company, 1912);
A Victim of the Mormons (1910); Francis Ford, dir., A Study in Scarlet (USA: Universal Film
Manufacturing Company, 1914); George Pearson, dir., A Study in Scarlet (UK: Moss, 1914).
 75

woman from violence. One contemporary reviewer labeled the result "a rather labored

attempt to make an affair so nearly tragical appear ridiculous." Whether audiences read

the tale as funny or frightening, the message was clear: Mormons were everywhere, and

they would do anything to add women to their fold.

According to popular perception, Mormon missionaries targeted women because

of the community's need for an ever-increasing supply of plural wives.54 A typical report

of missionary activities in Europe in 1899 described a group of Swiss converts as "a

small regiment of future wives."55 Fifteen years later, a short news item informed readers

that the Mormons were sending between eight and nine hundred women converts to Utah

each year from continental Europe alone. (Such reports seldom enumerate male

converts.) Women converts were seldom given credit for any agency in their emigration:

in some cases they were simply passive objects, as when they were described as
en

"imported." Other reports depicted women converts as victims taken by force. This

apparently worldwide epidemic of young women being caressed, cajoled, or coerced into

52
Langdon Elwyn Mitchell, Two Mormons from Muddlety, in Love in the Backwoods, illustrated
by Gilbert Gaul (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897). Online at http://www.archive.org. Originally
published in Harper's Magazine.
53
"West Virginia Discovered," review of Love in the Backwoods by Langdon Elwyn Mitchell,
Chicago Daily Tribune, February 27, 1897.
54
"Women Here and There—Their Frills and Fancies," Chicago Daily Tribune, March 4, 1900.
55
"Mormons at Work in Europe: Secure Girl Converts in Switzerland and May Be Looking for
More in France," Chicago Daily Tribune, November 2, 1899
56
"Varied Activities of Women," Chicago Daily Tribune, May 31, 1914.
57
"'Imported' Mormon Girls: Church Representative Denies Charge and Quotes Senator Smoot,"
New York Times, January 15, 1912; "Say Mormons Abducted Girl: Mother and Priest Allege That Lizzie
Roach Was Taken by Hotel Man," New York Times, November 6, 1903. In the latter case, the story of a
girl's disappearance from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, made the front page in New York City.
 76

Mormonism led one women's group to denounce "the Mormon Church as a powerful

influence in the degradation of the citizenship of the world at large."

Polygamy, like Mormon theology, was not merely a threat to the victims' eternal

salvation but also their mental and physical health. Plural marriage, critics declared,

corroded the minds and bodies of all who participated in it. One 1899 expose declared

that the "baneful existence" of polygamy could not but turn every Mormon wife into "a

lonely disconsolate woman," broken in spirit as the fear that her husband might at any

moment turn up with a new wife ate "canker-like, at her vitality."59 A female physician

lectured in 1900 that Mormon women "were degenerate, and abnormal, an inevitable

result of their position and function in Mormon society."60 Novelists pictured this

degradation in far less clinical terms and to far greater effect. In 1903, Harry Leon

Wilson imaged the toll on plural wives as a regression to an animal state: a polygamous

wife must undoubtedly become "hardened, debased, devoid of charm, dehumanised [sic],

a brood-beast of the field."61 Geraldine Bonner's epic tale of the pioneer journey West

described the children resulting from such unions: "little, light, half-naked figures

circling and bending in games that babies played when men lived in cliffs and caves."62

Polygamy made animals of the adults who submitted to it, and savages even of the

innocent children who had no choice about their participation in the system.

"Mothers Discuss Marriage Question," Chicago Daily Tribune, April 28, 1911.
59
"A Woman's Life in Utah," in "From the Arena," New York Times, March 26, 1899.
60
"On Morman [sic] Conditions," New York Times, February 26, 1900.
61
Lions of the Lord, 369.
62
The Emigrant Trail (New York: Duffield & Company, 1910). Online at
http://books.google.com/. Quote on 241.
 77

Eventually, even the most avid anti-Mormons had to acknowledge that polygamy

was waning. But this decrease in plural marriage did not acquit Mormons of the charge of

immorality. Rather, in the face of changing historical circumstances many non-Mormon

Americans simply re-imagined Mormon sexual deviance. The difference in the Saints'

theology between marriage "for time" (on earth) and marriage "for eternity" (in the

afterlife) made the news when a woman who had been sealed to one man for eternity and

another for time sued for a portion of her eternal spouse's estate. The lawsuit took a

backseat in the story to an explanation of the strange Mormon beliefs behind it. After

noting that "polygamy in one form is being practiced continually with the sanction of the

Mormon church," the article explained the difference between the two kinds of Mormon

marriage and the Church's assertion that it is permissible to be married simultaneously to

two different people—one for time and one for eternity. The writer also pointedly

explained that eternal or celestial marriages have "a decidedly earthly character," thus

inserting the necessary element of Mormon sexual debauchery into the story.63

Mormons also appeared willing to perform marriage ceremonies for anyone under

any circumstances, as when a Mormon elder—a janitor in Ogden, Utah—married the

governor's daughter to a poor young man without her father's consent. The article

focused first on the ridiculousness of a janitor being authorized to perform such a solemn

ceremony. But the unspoken message was frightening: because of the nature of the

63
"Sheds Light on Polygamy: Elder Penrose of the Mormon Church Tells Conditions under
Which It Is Recognized Today," Chicago Daily Tribune, November 14, 1903. Celestial polygamy came
together with the performance of rituals for the dead in a later article, "Mormons Cling to Plural
Wives[...]Dead Wed and Divorced," Chicago Daily Tribune, December 13, 1904. Reports of Theodore
Roosevelt's baptism by proxy also point to polygamy in the afterlife with the assertion that Roosevelt has
been sealed to several dead queens in addition to his own wife. See page 14.

*
 78

Mormon priesthood, any Mormon man, anywhere, any time, could give your daughter

away without your consent.64 This sinister subtext came to the fore when a man reported

to be a Mormon priest performed the marriage of a New York heiress to a divorced

entertainer at a time when remarriage after divorce was regarded as tantamount to

polygamy. The accusation was so serious that the Presiding Elder of the Eastern States

Missions of the Latter-day Saints wrote to The New York Times to deny that the man who

performed the marriage was a Mormon.65 Clearly, Americans believed, the Mormons

completely disregarded public morality.

Thus representations of Mormon lasciviousness persisted throughout this period

in a variety of ways. Whereas Americans grudgingly acknowledged that the majority of

the Saints had given up polygamy, Mormonism's history of polygamous rebellion

remained a staple subject for authors, historians, propagandists, and the budding film

industry. Further, rumors of secret plural marriages within the United States and attention

to openly polygamous communities in Mormon colonies just beyond the nation's borders

reminded Americans that polygamy might be hiding next door, and was certainly only a

train ride away. Attention to Mormon sexual depravity also migrated to other

controversial issues, including the Saints' beliefs about celestial marriages and their

general disregard for accepted morality. More than twenty-five years after the Saints

"Governor's Daughter Elopes: Daughter Wedded by a Janitor, an Elder in the Mormon Church,
a Poor Man," New York Times, June 10, 1908.
65
"Eugenia Kelley Wed to Dancer Al Davis: Ceremony Performed by a Mormon Priest without a
Church in Elkton, Maryland: All Other Pastors Refuse," New York Times, November 18, 1915. This front
page story contrasted the Mormon who performed the wedding with Presbyterian and Methodist Episcopal
ministers who refused to assist the couple because it was "against their scruples." The Mormon denial is
Walter P. Monson, "Concerning Mormon Clergyman," letter to the editor, November 25, 1915.
 79

sustained Woodruffs Manifesto, Gentiles continued to depict Mormons as both strange

and immoral in matters of love and marriage.

Violence: "a religion of [...] iron hand to punish the recalcitrant"66

In the popular American mind, the perceived willingness of Joseph Smith,

Brigham Young, and other Mormon leaders to enforce their interests with violence

carried well beyond the protection of plural marriage. Rather, non-Mormons believed that

violence suffused all aspects of the Saints' lives—religious, political, and social—and

was used against innocent Gentiles and disobedient Saints. Non-Mormon Americans

viewed these violent tendencies as so pervasive that they saw them as inherent to the

religion itself.

Awareness and acceptance of the Saints' organized violence was so widespread

that when writers mentioned the Mormon secret police under any of various names—

Danites, Daughters of Zion, Avenging Angels, or Destroying Angels—they did so with

little or no explanation. Readers had a clear idea what the organization and its purposes

were. When a writer chose to explain the group it was easily done: they were "the

mysterious and much-dreaded band [...] concerning which so much has been said while

so little is known." This historian goes on to describe the group as "in plain English,

assassins in the name of the Lord."67

66
Alfred Henry Lewis, "The Mormon Purpose," introduction to John Doyle Lee, The Mormon
Menace: Being the Confession of John Doyle Lee, Danite, An Official Assassin of the Mormon Church
under the Late Brigham Young (New York: Home Protection Publishing Co., 1905), x. Online at
http://books.google.com/.
67
Bancroft, 124, 125. Though Bancroft, who published his History of Utah in 1889, was generally
sympathetic toward the Mormons, he accepted both the ongoing existence and bloody purposes of this
 80

While such a group existed during the nineteenth century under Prophets Smith

and Young, primarily for the purpose of defending Mormons from outside attack, their

image in the popular American mind far outstripped their historical size or significance.6'

Mark Twain mocked Americans' overblown imaginings about the group in his

description, in his 1872 Western travelogue Roughing It (reprinted in 1899 and 1913:

It is a luscious country for thrilling evening stories about assassinations of

intractable Gentiles. [...] tales of how Burton galloped in among the
pleading and defenceless [sic] "Morisites" and shot them down, men and
women, like so many dogs. And how Bill Hickman, a Destroying Angel,
shot Drown and Arnold dead for bringing suit against him for a debt. And
how Porter Rockwell did this and that dreadful thing. And how heedless
people often come to Utah and make remarks about Brigham, or
polygamy, or some other sacred matter, and the very next morning and
daylight such parties are sure to be found lying up some back alley,
contentedly waiting for a hearse.69

Twain was on the lookout during his journey for some evidence of the dreaded band of

religious assassins and their victims, but came away virtually empty-handed. The closest

he came to proof was dinner with a self-proclaimed Destroying Angel, "But alas for all

our romances he was nothing but a loud, profane, offensive old blackguard!" Twain, at

least, left Utah convinced that his Gentile sources were stretching the truth about the

Mormons out of all proportion.

secret organization. Surprisingly, he did so based on the testimony of sources whose authors he later
dismissed as unreliable—apostates who he referred to as playing the role of "traitor" and labeled "false-
hearted and vile." Their work, he contended, represented "a class of anti-Mormon literature, not altogether
creditable to its authors or supporters." See his description of John C. Bennett (149-50) and the partial list
of writers similarly motivated by desires for revenge and profit (150-53, n. 11).
68
See chapter 1, pp. 15-16.
69
(Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1873; New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers,
1913), 102. Citations are to the 1913 edition. Online at http://www.google.com/books.
 81

Americans persisted, however, in believing exaggerated descriptions of the

group's size and activities. But many writers did feel the need to explain the supposed

justification for the group: the doctrine of blood atonement. Popular American lore held

that the Saints believed there were some sins so grievous that the sinner had to be killed,

literally spilling his or her blood on the ground, in order to fully atone for that sin, and

further that it was a responsibility of every good Mormon to enact this doctrine against

their neighbors. Many non-Mormons believed the Saints used the doctrine of blood

atonement to justify the murder of any person who displeased the priesthood. The Danites

or Destroying Angels existed to carry out such punitive killings. Americans believed the

group acted on orders from the hierarchy, who members had taken an oath never to

question. The oath, as reported by William Alexander Linn in his then-respected history

of the Saints, would have terrified any Gentile reader:

In the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, I do solemnly obligate myself
ever to regard the Prophet and the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-Day Saints as the supreme head of the Church on earth,
and to obey them in all things, the same as the supreme God; that I will
stand by my brethren in danger or difficulty, and will uphold the
Presidency, right or wrong; and that I will ever conceal, and never reveal,
the secret purposes of this society, called Daughters of Zion. Should I ever
do the same, I hold my life as the forfeiture, in a caldron [sic] of boiling
oil.71

Novelist Harry Leon Wilson emphasized the danger to Gentiles, adding the line "I will

cause all who speak evil of the Presidency or Heads of the Church to die the death of

dissenters or apostates, unless they speedily confess and repent."72 Acting under such a

Story of the Mormons, 192.

72
Lions of the Lord, 84-85. Italics added. Wilson labeled the group the Sons of Dan and traded
Linn's "caldron of oil" for "a fire of burning tar and brimstone." The oaths related by authors after 1890 are
often a combination of the oath of secrecy reported by Sampson Avard at Joseph Smith's Missouri trial for
 82

promise to submit to death rather than disobey the orders of a priesthood that claimed to

be God's mouthpiece, no matter how morally wrong they might be, what would a person

not do?

Novelists routinely produced stories for non-Mormon readers in which individual

Saints feared for their lives should they ever displease the higher ranks of the priesthood,

and newspapers also reported such claims. Former Mormons who testified about the

Saints' secret temple ceremonies during Congressional hearings on Mormon Senator-

7^

elect Reed Smoot in 1904 and 1905 reportedly exhibited fear "bordering on hysteria."

These witnesses testified that the temple endowment ceremony undergone by nearly all

adult Mormons included an oath that should the person ever reveal the Saints' secrets,

their throat would be cut, their tongue torn out, and their heart, bowels, and other organs

ripped from their bodies.74 The papers alleged that, far from being merely symbolic, this

oath and the penalties it described were strictly enforced by the Mormon hierarchy. Soon

after, reports surfaced that apostate and ex-Senator Frank J. Cannon had been threatened

for "fighting for his State against the hierarchy and the awful teachings of that church."75

treason in 1841 and the similar binding promises reported by Mountain Meadows Massacre participant
John D. Lee in Mormonism Unveiled, first published after his execution in 1877.
73
See "Woman Reveals Mormon Secrets: Former Member Tells of Weird Ceremonies in
Endowment House and Temple: Takes a Grewsome Oath," Chicago Daily Tribune, and "Aged Mormon
Woman, Trembling, Tells Oaths," New York Times, both on December 17, 1904. The Tribune put the story
on the front page.
74
"Discloses Oath of Mormonism: Witness at Smoot Hearing Tells Obligation Assumed at
Endowment House," Chicago Daily Tribune, December 14, 1904. The Tribune published pictures
illustrating witness descriptions of the endowment ceremony: "Revealing Deep Secrets of Mormon Church
at Washington," December 16, 1904. Far from presenting the ritual as terrifying, the images defused the
alleged power of the ceremony and exposed it as simply more weird Mormon superstition.
75
"Cannon Fights the Mormons: Utah's Former Senator Joins New Party to Drive His Church Out
of Politics," Chicago Daily Tribune, October 1, 1904. See also "Calls Senator Cannon Hero: Mrs. Schoff
Says Mormons Have Condemned Him to Death," New York Times, September 20, 1905.
 83

The Church's reputed willingness to enforce the doctrine of blood atonement

against offending Gentiles was powerfully demonstrated in regular references to past

armed conflicts between Mormons and non-Mormon Americans. The most frequently

told story was that of the Mountain Meadows massacre.77 John D. Lee's memoir-expose

of the tragedy was reprinted under the title The Mormon Menace in 1905, and the

settlement he founded at Lee's Ferry, Arizona, regularly appeared, complete with a

7R

reminder of who Lee was, in stories about the exploration of the American West.

Survivors of the massacre also made the news, as when a group held a reunion in

Arkansas in 1893.79 As late as 1913, a report that the Supreme Court would hear

arguments about a survivor's claim for reparations noted that the events at Mountain

Meadows had "never been told to general satisfaction."80 Although Lee had been

convicted of the crime and executed, Americans suspected that many Mormons higher up

in the Church had gone unpunished.

As always, fictional treatments offered readers a much more visceral experience

of the subject, and the public's interest carried the story across genres. In addition to
Between 1890 and 1917 dozens of obituary notices, for example, in the New York Times and
the Chicago Daily Tribune made reference to the "Mormon wars" in Missouri, the "Mormon rebellion" in
Illinois, and the Utah War of 1857-1858, including the deceased's participation in specific incidents like
the death of Joseph Smith or the investigation of the Mountain Meadows massacre.
77
For an account of the events surrounding the Mountain Meadows massacre, see chapter 1, esp.
29-35.
78
See, for example, "The Yavi-Supas: An Almost Unknown Indian Tribe," San Francisco
Chronicle, August 18, 1890, and "Tell of Vast Riches in the Grand Canyon: Men Engaged in Gold
Dredging Operations Expect to Astonish the World," New York Times, June 19, 1912. Also Frederick S.
Dellenbaugh, A Canyon Voyage: The Narrative of the Second Powell Expedition Down the Green-
Colorado River from Wyoming, and the Explorations on Land, in the Years 1871 and 1872 (New York:
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1908), 210-12.
79
"Mountain Meadows Massacre: The Survivors to Hold a Reunion in Arkansas," New York
Times, October 10, 1893.
80
"Revives Frontier Tragedy: Suit May Reveal Secret of Mountain Meadows Massacre," New
York Times, December 25, 1913.
 84

references and retellings in such expected places as stories of the Western frontier, the

massacre even appeared in science fiction. In Jack London's 1915 novel The Star Rover,

an imprisoned man learns to separate his spirit from his body and, in this way, travels

across space and time. He does not control the events he experiences, however, and in

several different journeys finds himself living through the Fancher party's weeks in Utah

up to and including the Mountain Meadows massacre. London's story provides a detailed

first-person narrative from a Gentile victim's perspective. The narrator describes in detail

the hardships the emigrants suffered on the trail through Utah, where they are refused

supplies and endlessly harassed by the Mormons, and finally relates the terrors of the

days of siege and the final slaughter. No member of the Fancher party, according to

London's telling, provokes the Mormons at any time, and the Indians are merely acting

on the Mormons' orders. In short, the Saints alone bring about the incident. London

further heightened the tension of the story by writing from the perspective of "a boy of

eight or nine." Readers look out on the weeks of mistreatment, the Gentiles' growing

"sense of drifting to doom," and finally the destruction of the entire party through the

eyes of a child. The tale of the massacre ceases abruptly when the boy is killed as he tries

to escape, leaving readers with a vivid picture of the innocence and terror of the Gentile
01

victims and the utter brutality of their Mormon murderers.

The Saints responded to such stories by arguing that they had only organized or

fought in self-defense and that any violence they committed was in response to Gentile

81
Jack London, The Star Rover (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1915), 106-116, 125-54.
Online at http://books.google.com/. The New York Times included The Star Rover in its review of the best
fiction of 1915: "The Year's Landmarks in Fiction," November 28, 1915.
 85

persecution and violence. But non-Mormon authors frequently entirely dismissed these

claims and any evidence supporting them, claiming that Mormon violence against

Gentiles far outweighed Gentile violence against them and further denying that Gentiles

had committed significant acts of violence against the Saints. Thomas Gregg for example,

in his biography of Joseph Smith, scoffed at the Saints "crying out against 'persecution'"

and declared the expulsion from Missouri justified. William Alexander Linn wrote that

"the Mormons pictured themselves as victims of an almost unprecedented persecution."

He also labeled the events at Haun's Mill, where an unprovoked attack by a Missouri

militia left eighteen Mormons dead, the Mormons' fault. To bolster his argument Linn

carefully ordered his facts, presenting the governor's extermination order, dated October

27, 1838, after he narrated the events of Haun's Mill, which occurred on October 30.

Only a reader paying close attention to Linn's flurry of dates would notice that the order

precipitated the attack and not the other way around. Even sympathetic writers like

Hubert Howe Bancroft, who railed against incidents of American brutality against the

Mormons, did not take the Saints' experiences of persecution into account when
Of

explaining incidents like Mountain Meadows.

When writers acknowledged a connection between Gentile persecution and the

Saints' violence, they did not treat the persecution as an explanation of later Mormon

82
Prophet of Palmyra, 145^17.
83
Story of the Mormons, 411. Italics added.
84
Ibid, 200-207. Linn acknowledged that a ten-year-old boy and an elderly man were among the
Saints killed at Haun's Mill—the latter murdered with a corn cutter, Linn wrote, as he begged for his life.
Yet he informed the reader that "The Mormons have always considered this 'massacre,' as they called it,
the crowning outrage of their treatment in Missouri," characterizing this assessment of the events at Haun's
Mill a gross exaggeration (204).
85
History of Utah, 543-71.
 86

acts. In The Mormon Prophet, Lily Dougall's heroine joins the Saints and stays with them

well after she no longer believes in Joseph Smith's religion. She does so out of a sense of

righteous solidarity with them as victims of intolerance. Harry Leon Wilson went further,

actually explaining the Mountain Meadows massacre as partly the result of years of

Gentile brutality. Wilson's protagonist, Joel Rae, hardens himself against any pangs of

conscience by thinking of his sister, murdered at Haun's Mill; his elderly father, killed by

the militia as the Mormons evacuated Nauvoo; and his sickly mother, dead among the

first wave of Saints forced to trek West.86 But underneath the hardships they have faced,

the Saints are still basically corrupt: Dougall's heroine finally leaves because Smith

offers her a choice between plural marriage and death.87 Wilson's hero lives his life after

Mountain Meadows on the edge of guilt-induced insanity fueled by his realization that

the massacre resulted from the unholiness of his religion. Such writers maintained that

Mormon violence was not related to past experiences of persecution but rather was rooted

in the ambition and greed that were the religion's foundation.

Many stories of Mormon violence focus on the time before Brigham Young's

death in 1877, but Americans did not believe that the Mormon willingness to destroy

Gentiles for offenses real or (more likely) imagined was a thing of the past any more than

they believed that it was the stuff only of fiction. A spectacular 1902 murder seemed

tailor-made to confirm their fears. The accused killer, William Hooper Young, was

Brigham Young's grandson, and the victim was a young Gentile woman. As if this was

not enough, newspapers made the most of the fact that the murder was particularly

86
Lions of the Lord, 211,215.
87
Mormon Prophet, 374-75, 381.
 87

bloody, and that Young reportedly made repeated references to blood atonement in his

journals. Although many Saints declared that Young had not been active in the faith for

years and others denied the existence of any Mormon doctrine that could justify murder,

coverage of the story increasingly conformed to the standard anti-Mormon script.89 When

Young evaded police for several days after he had been identified as a suspect,

newspapers reported that police believed that the Mormons were hiding him.90 Once

Young was captured and put on trial, witnesses claimed that they had received death

threats that referred to blood atonement, and the prosecution implied that Young's

"Mormon friends and relatives" were making witnesses disappear.91 Young's conviction

drew less attention than the wild speculations his crime resurrected about Mormons'

irrational beliefs and penchant for violence: even after coverage of this murder subsided,

reminders of blood atonement filled the news.92

No one exploited the American fascination with Mormon violence better than the

classic Western novelist Zane Grey, whose books and endless movie adaptations of them

remained popular throughout the twentieth century. Grey built the entire plot of his most

"Slayer of Mrs. Anna Pulitzer Is Known: Police After William H. Young of This City:
Evidences of Murder in Man's Apartments—He Is Son of Promoter J. W. Young and Grandson of Brigham
Young," New York Times, September 20, 1902.
89
"Blood Atonement Denied: President McGuarrie of Eastern States Mormon Mission Says There
Is No Such Thing in the Religion," New York Times, September 21, 1902.
90
"Jewels of Murdered Anna Pulitzer Found.: Earrings Recovered in a Park Row Pawnshop:
Pawn Ticket, Dagger, and Woman's Clothing in Trunk He Sent to Chicago—Police Theory of Mormon
Protection," New York Times, September 21, 1902.
91
"Young Murder Witness Threatened," New York Times, January 27, 1903; "Witness Threatened
with Death," Chicago Daily Tribune, January 27, 1903; "Miss Dickinson is Object of Mormon Threats,"
Chicago Daily Tribune, January 29, 1903; "Hooper Young's Trial Today: His Lawyer Will Ask Further
Delay—Prosecution Blames M Friends and Relatives," New York Times, February 4, 1903.
92
See '"Blood Atonement': Mormon Practices in English Literature—Conan Doyle and Robert
Louis Stevenson on the Latter Day Saints—Popular Beliefs Growing Out of the Mountain Meadows
Massacre," New York Times, September 28, 1902; "Mormons Making Canvass for Converts in Chicago,"
Chicago Daily Tribune, October 26, 1902; and "Girl Who Wrote on Mormons Threatened," Chicago Daily
Tribune, December 13, 1903.
 88

famous Western, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), around the stereotype. Mormon

heroine Jane Withersteen refuses to marry a local Church elder, despite the bishop's

orders, and her co-religionists turn against her. They beat and nearly murder her Gentile

hired hand and friend, steal her cattle and horses, and finally threaten to take her adopted

daughter from her if she does not capitulate. Withersteen herself acknowledges to the

Gentile hero Lassiter that "the men of my creed are unnaturally cruel." According to

Grey, Mormons submit to such treatment from their leaders because the Church teaches

them they "should be grateful on her knees for this baptism of fire; that through

misfortune, sacrifice, and suffering her soul might be fused pure gold."94 The Church

controlled members then through a combination of applied violence and teachings that

convinced members they should not only submit to the violence but be grateful for it.

Whether true or not, any proof of Mormon violence caught the public interest in

this period—and made money for reporters and editors, authors and publishers,

playwrights and producers and filmmakers. Americans generally denied that Gentile

violence or intolerance played any significant role in fostering Mormon violence. Rather,

non-Mormon historians, novelists, reporters, and filmmakers asserted that violence was

somehow built into the Mormon faith and could strike Mormons and non-Mormons,

individuals or whole communities without warning. Prior to World War I, America's

appetite for images of violent Mormons was seemingly insatiable.

(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1912), 13.

 89

Theocratic Control: "absolute unity in religion, government, and society"95

Virtually every accusation leveled at the Saints came down in one way or another

to the issue of the priesthood's power over individual members. To become a Mormon,

Gentiles believed, was to cede control of one's life to higher-ups who decided how

followers would act in their political, economic, and social lives. Mormons were not free

to make their own decisions about who to vote for, how to make a living, where to live,

or who (or how many) to marry. Non-Mormons could not believe that converts entered

such a community knowingly and willingly. They must have joined under false pretenses,

not understanding that they were delivering themselves up as ever-obedient servants to a

tyrannical hierarchy bent on building an empire; or perhaps converts were not acting

under misinformation but out of fear for their families and their lives; or maybe they did

not act of their own accord at all, but were compelled to do so through some form of

mind control. Whatever the explanation for the continued growth of the Church of Jesus

Christ of Latter-day Saints and the worldly success of Mormon communities and

individuals, Americans were certain that a Mormon was the complete antithesis of what

an American should be: a free, independent, and self-determining individual who shaped

a government separate from any particular religion, "of the people, by the people, and for

the people"—and not the other way around.

While opponents to Utah's admission as a state frequently employed polygamy as

a rallying cry to stir Americans to action, they were primarily concerned with granting

Mormons the power of self-rule that would come with statehood. An article in the Gentile

Bancroft, 369.
 90

Salt Lake Tribune, later reprinted in the Chicago Daily Tribune, said it all: "The

Mormons are engaged in this country in building up their own kingdom. That means a

government of their own; that means a government entirely, in all its attributes,

antagonistic to republican form of government. It is a kingdom." Although individual

Mormons voted, critics warned, it was all for show: members of the hierarchy "simply

use[d] the votes of their people."96

The Chicago Daily Tribune—a Republican paper, presumably still committed to

the party's original anti-Mormon platform—suggested a novel compromise. Nevada, it

frequently noted, was a "moribund" state with too small a population to participate in

national affairs and without sufficient resources to attract more people. Utah, on the other

hand, had abundant economic and human resources but was an undesirable addition to

the union as an independent state because Mormons outnumbered Gentiles two to one in

the territory and thus "the majority of its people ha[d] no independence of thought or

action, but [we]re the absolute creatures of their priesthood."97 The Tribune therefore

proposed that the Utah territory be absorbed into the existing state of Nevada. This

arrangement would give Nevada sufficient people and resources to be a productive

member of the union, while the primarily Gentile population of Nevada would combine

with the Gentiles in Utah to prevent the state from falling "under the control of the

Mormon theocracy."

"A King in the United States," September 30, 1890.

97
Utah to Statehood: Senator Faulkner's Bill Providing for Admission," January 7, 1892 ; "Let
Utah Wait Awhile," reprint from Portland Oregonian, July 5, 1891.
98
"The Danger of Mormon Statehood in Utah," July 1, 1891. The Tribune published regular
editorials on its proposed unification of the state of Nevada and Utah territory. The paper also suggested
 91

Utah gained statehood despite such objections, and when the Mormons elected

one of their own to the represent Utah at the national level accusations of the Church's

dangerous political influence poured in from all sides. Resurrecting claims that had been

leveled at Joseph Smith more than half a century before, some accused the Church of

trying to take over the United States government: "It may even be the fact that some of

their leaders dream of a time when they may hold the balance of power in this

government and be able to dictate the election of a President through one or the other

party." In the light of such fears, Mormon missionaries looked more like they were

collecting voters than wives.99 Non-Mormons believed the Saints forced converts to vote

according to the Prophet's dictates by teaching those converts just as they ensured that

the women they collected would submit to becoming polygamous wives: "that 'those

only are the people of God who render absolute obedience to the Mormon

priesthood.'"100 Follow the Prophet's orders or forfeit your place among the people of

God—now and in the hereafter.

Such were the warnings of a slew of histories and novels, whether dedicated

wholly to the Mormons or not. In A History of Christianity in America, Leonard Woolsey

Bacon (supposedly a disinterested historian) defined Mormonism as a "political,

economical, religious, and, at need, military community, handled at will by unscrupulous

chiefs."101 Edgar Folk's The Mormon Monster promised readers a complete exploration

combining New Mexico and Arizona territories into a single state, citing the need to balance out the
Mormon, Mexican, and Indian populations in New Mexico with the Gentiles of Arizona.
99
No title, Chicago Daily Tribune, February 5, 1898.
IOO "Church a n c j clergy," Chicago Daily Tribune, October 30,1898.
101
Reprint edition (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1898). Available online via Google
Books at http://books.google.com/.
 92

of Mormonism not only as a religion but as a political and social system. To illustrate the

Church's supposedly enormous ambitions and potential reach, the cover of Folk's book

featured an octopus with ten grasping tentacles extending beyond the book's edges in
1 (\-y

every direction. Alfred Henry Lewis warned in his introduction to the reprint of John

D. Lee's memoir that "the Mormons are never anything but Mormons, voting on this side

or that, for one man or another, as the Mormon interest dictates and the Mormon

President and the Apostles direct. Every Mormon who has a vote occupies a double

position; he is a Mormon in religion and a Mormon in political faith."103 The Mormons

were a body politic with unlimited ambitions.

While the election of Brigham H. Roberts to the House of Representatives caused

some discussion of the dangers of Mormons holding political office, that scandal was

nothing compared to the brouhaha that erupted when Utah elected Reed Smoot, a

member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and thus one of the highest-ranking

members of the church, to the U.S. Senate. While polygamy was a key feature of the

ensuing Senate investigation—which dragged on for almost four years and which, as with

Roberts, examined not just the man but his church as well—in the end it was less

important than the question of Smoot's primary loyalties. Smoot, who was not and never

had been a polygamist, could not be accused of personally breaking the law. The

question, therefore, was whether his membership in an organization that reputedly

encouraged members to do so meant that he could not be trusted to uphold the law.

Further, Smoot's opponents claimed that Mormons were required, as part of the
102
Chicago, IL: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1900. Online at http://www.archive.org.
 93

endowment ceremony, not only to swear to keep the Church's secrets, but also to obey

the priesthood in all temporal as well as spiritual matters.104 The Church's most vigorous

critics claimed that Smoot would be a Mormon agent in the nation's halls of power,

advancing his Church's goals of empire and undercutting any efforts to contain or control

the Church and its adherents. Smoot and the other members of the Church called before

the investigatory committee adamantly denied the existence of any oath holding the

Church higher than the government. They also insisted that Smoot would only use his

seat in the Senate on behalf the people of Utah. The Senate eventually voted, in 1907, to

allow Smoot to keep his seat. But, as evidenced by The New York Times'1 assertion that

the Senate's failure to expel Smoot would mean "his permanent retention in the Senate by

the Mormon Church," Americans remained leery of the church's political influence.105

When the fight over woman suffrage became a national issue, critics immediately

pointed to the Mormons of the intermountain West, where many states had granted

women the right to vote in the 1870s and 1880s, as proof that women voters were merely

agents of those who ruled them.106 The New York Times, analyzing 1904 election returns,

criticized Utah women's "curious contentment with a system of which they are

themselves the chief victims."107 According to a 1911 editorial, the Church extended the

promise of suffrage to female converts to lure them in, all the while knowing that it
104
See, for example, "What Is the Oath?" editorial, Chicago Daily Tribune, March 3, 1904.
105
"Senate Refuses to Oust Smoot," February 21, 1907. For a full exploration of the Senate's
investigation of Reed Smoot and the role that investigation played in negotiating a new relationship
between the United States government and non-Protestant religious groups, see Kathleen Flake, The
Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
106
See, for example, "Women's Suffrage a Failure, He Says: Investigator Tells of Conditions
Found in Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and Wyoming...Only Those Allied with the Mormon Church and a
Certain Class Exercise the Privilege," New York Times, January 17, 1909.
107
"Topics of the Times," editorial, November 10, 1904.
 94

would command their votes after they arrived in Utah. In short, "if woman is enslaved

[...] the ballot cannot free her," but instead women's votes would prove, "like every

subservient vote, an invitation to tyranny and corruption."109

Prominent ex-Mormons like Frank J. Cannon, ex-Senator from the Utah territory

and son of a prominent Apostle, toured the country selling books and delivering lectures

on the ever-growing Mormon "tyranny and corruption" in the West, thrilling Americans

with the promise of authentic accounts of the Church's secrets. Cannon regularly lectured

to women's reform groups and anti-Mormon rallies around the country between 1905 and

1915, as well as publishing detailed accounts of the Latter-day Saints' control over

Western politics. His 1910 expose "The Mormon King," published in Everybody's

magazine, promised a full account of "the establishment of an absolute throne and

dynasty by one American citizen over half a million others" in the contemporary

Church.110 His first book, Under the Prophet in Utah: The National Menace of a Political

Priestcraft (1911), proposed to prove the Prophet's determination to subvert the

Constitution. Cannon also asserted that the Prophet enjoyed economic control of the

Mormons through the collection of excessive tithes put to unrevealed uses and of the

entire Western population through management of banking, industry, and the press.111

Two years later, Cannon traced the historical development of these contemporary

108
"Suffragettes and Mormonism," New York Times, March 13, 1911.
109
B., "The Ballot in Utah," letter to the editor, New York Times, January 12, 1915.
110
Large advertisements for this article appeared in both The New York Times and the Chicago
Daily Tribune on November 22, 1910.
111
Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins (Boston, MA: CM. Clark Publishing Co., 1911). Online at
http://books.google.com/. See also The New York Times review in "One Hundred Christmas Books,"
December 3, 1911, and the Chicago Daily Tribune review, "Utah in Her Chains: The Revolting Bondage in
Which She Is Held under the Feet of the Mormon Prophet, Joseph F. Smith," December 17, 1911.
 95

circumstances in Brigham Young and His Mormon Empire (1913), "The life story of a

man who founded a Mohammedan empire in a puritan republic." Here, the worldly

ambitions of the Mormon leaders are both a direct result and confirmation of their un-

Christian religious principles.

As the Smoot hearing faded into national memory and Reed Smoot conducted

himself in the national Senate in a way that largely allayed Americans' fears that he

would act as a pawn of the Church, the depiction of the Church leadership's control over

Mormon members and their Gentile neighbors changed shape. The popular image of the

church morphed from a political machine into a business trust like Standard Oil. Rumors

that the Church was an economic enterprise were not new: in the 1890s there were

regular reports that missionaries were collecting converts from among the illiterate poor

of the Southern United States and Europe to provide cheap labor for the Church's

businesses. The historian William Alexander Linn asserted in 1902 that the Mormon

leadership—religious, political, and social—ultimately sought to make the prophet and

his closest counselors wealthy men. To this end he dedicated several sections of The

Story of Mormonism to Smith's business enterprises and Young's management of the

Utah economy. Linn finally blamed Gentile opposition to the Mormons' on scurrilous

Cannon and George L. Knapp (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company). Advertisements on
October 12, 1913, and November 30, 1913, promised readers proof of Mormon political machinations, but
also "The real inside facts about one of the most romantic and interesting characters in American history."
Cannon and his publishers clearly hoped the book would attract not only serious anti-Mormons, but also
readers just looking for a good story in the vein of popular Westerns.
113
See, for example, "Are Mormons Contract Laborers?: Test Case Will Be Made of the Next
Consignment," Chicago Daily Tribune, May 15, 1890; "Watching for Mormons: Are They Brought to This
Country under Contract?," New York Times, June 1, 1890; and the front page story '"Americanism and
Immigration': Theodore Roosevelt of New York Responds to This Toast," Chicago Daily Tribune, January
21, 1893, which quotes Roosevelt as encouraging existing immigration restrictions against "paupers,
criminals, Mormons, Anarchists, and the like."
 96

domination of local economies built on their willingness to steal from their neighbors.

The leaders' greed also led them, according to Linn, to dupe foreign converts into making

the journey to Utah with promises of a life of ease and plenty, while in fact Young and

his fellow Apostles kept all the best property for themselves and consigned the newest

recruits to an existence in the desert—all the while ensuring that they paid their tithes in

full.114

Americans finally labeled the Church itself a trust during the Smoot hearing,

when witnesses testified to the "growing evil" of "church domination of politics for the

purpose of securing valuable franchises and rights."115 As Americans debated what to do

about secular monopolies like the Rockefeller business empire in ensuing years, the

Supreme Court's sanction of government confiscation of Church property under the

Edmunds-Tucker Act was cited as a key precedent for trust-busting.116 Finally, the

Church's involvement in the Western sugar beet industry came under fire, with one U.S.

Senator declaring, "The most grasping and unconscionable trust to be found anywhere is

the American Sugar Refining Company [...] commonly called the 'sugar trust.' The steel

trust and Standard Oil, in point of dishonesty and unscrupulous conduct, are but suckling

babes in comparison with the 'Sugar Trust.'" This trust, he testified, fixed sugar beet

114
That readers understood the Mormons as an economic and political power at least as much as a
religion is evident in contemporary scholarly reviews. For example, Smith biographer I. Woodbridge Riley
briefly discussed Linn's claims about Mormon religion before moving on to key revelations about the
Saints' economic activities (The American Journal of Theology 7, no. 1 [Jan., 1903], 124-25). Linn's book
was also reviewed in the academic journals Political Science Quarterly and The Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science. In the latter, the review appeared in an issue dedicated to Current
Political Problems (George D. Luetscher, Vol. 21 [Mar., 1903]: 159-60).
115
"Mormon Church a Trust: Senate Committee Told of System in Practice," Chicago Daily
Tribune, April 24, 1904.
116
See, for example, "Murphy Defends the Plan: Sees No Danger That Charter Would Provide
Refuge for Trusts," New York Times, March 13, 1910, and "The Rockefeller Foundation," editorial, March
18, 1910.
 97

prices in favor of the industry in accordance with the wishes of Latter-day Saint President

Joseph F.Smith.117

Newspaper coverage of the investigation in 1911 provided readers with histories

of the Church's involvement in business as well as evidence of its current control of the

sugar trust. According to one report, the Saints virtually controlled Utah's economy.

They operated stores, mines, railroads, banks, and ranches, and the sugar beet industry for

the benefit of the highest echelons of Church leadership. Average Mormons and Gentile

residents in Utah provided the capital that thus enriched Church leaders: "The church is

able to go into business," the story noted, "because of the money furnished by the tithing

fund." And of course the tithing fund exploited rank-and-file members, who paid their

tithes and accepted the Church's refusal to report either its income or its expenditures

because if they did not, they lost access to the temple and thus jeopardized their eternal

salvation. Church control of the economy was simply more evidence that the

priesthood manufactured doctrine in order to manage believers and increase the

hierarchy's power. During the congressional investigation of the sugar trust, one House

member succinctly summarized the American belief in this fusion of spiritual and

temporal concerns when he questioned President Smith: "Then the Mormon Church [...]

is not only a spiritual organization but a business organization?"119 The New York Times

artfully used the testimony of Latter-day Saint bishop and businessman Charles W.

117
"Bailey Denounces Johnson on Tariff [...] Clay Hits at Sugar Trust," New York Times, May 20,
1909.
118
"Mormon Chief Will Obey: Papers, However, Must Be Served—Church Does Much
Business," New York Times, June 19, 1911.
119
"Mormon Church in Sugar Trade: Cutler Tells House Committee of Relations with the Great
Trust," Chicago Daily Tribune, June 24, 1911.
 98

Nibley to damn the Mormons, closing one article on the hearings with the bishop's own

words: '"That is just what any sensible business man does anywhere,' he said. 'He gets

all he can.'"120

The interpretation of the Church as a business enterprise culminated in this period

with the 1913 publication of The Latter Day Saints: A Study of the Mormons, by
• 191

journalists Ruth and Reginald Wright Kauffman. In a long review, The New York

Times informed readers that the book proved that the Church was, in reality, a "financial
199

combination." With chapter titles like "Building the Empire," "Fire and Sword—and

Riches," and "Money-Bags," the Kaufmanns traced the development of Mormonism

from its beginnings "[i]n a time when economic unrest was producing pioneers material

and spiritual," to the early twentieth century when the Prophet acted as "a business-agent

of the Almighty." The result of the Church leadership's business acumen and the

Church's economic dominance was that it "control[led] the politics of the nation."

Whether the Church's primary purpose was economic or political the result was the

same: it dominated both spheres in an ever-expanding region, harboring achievable

ambitions of eventually controlling the nation.124

Although Church leaders were allegedly bent on the lofty goal of world

domination, according to non-Mormon observers no detail of members' lives was too

small to interest the Church leadership. Americans believed that the hierarchy used

politics 120
to protect itself legally and, in turn, to gain ever greater control over believers'
"Mormon President Lauds Sugar Trust," New York Times, June 28, 1911.
121
London: Williams andNorgate, 1913.
122
"The Latter Day Saints," January 12, 1913.
123
329, 345.
124
345.
 99

lives. Such control over a man's purse strings usually translated, critics asserted, into

control over all of his decisions. The threat of financial ruin was enough to keep most

members in line even with practices they abhorred. The story of a pair of Scottish

converts seemingly demonstrated the devastating consequences of disobedience: after the

couple refused to take a second wife, the church would not allow any Mormon in Utah—

which every reader knew meant most of the state's population—to employ the husband.

Reduced to poverty and thus unable to escape church territory, the couple maintained

their own moral convictions but could not save their children from the pervasive Mormon
i 'ye

influence around them.

The Mormons were also accused of dictating what members thought. In spite of

the Church's promises to relinquish all control over Utah's system of public education,

non-Mormon Americans remained convinced that it continued to use the schools to

indoctrinate residents. Cristics claimed that educators who strayed from the Church's

official position on any subject, religious or secular, were summarily dismissed. Non-

Mormons could hardly label the Church's management of its own Brigham Young

University inappropriate, and thus coverage of the firing of several professors—

reportedly for applying contemporary theories of higher criticism to the Bible—focused

on the inherent anti-modernism (in other words, irrationality and anti-intellectualism) of

\ 97

Mormon beliefs. But in 1915, when a number of professors went on strike to protest

the treatment of colleagues at the state University of Utah, observers questioned whether
125
"The Horrors of Mormonism: Miss Inez Coulter, a Utah Missionary, Tells Some Startling
Facts," Chicago Daily Tribune, October 7, 1890.
126
"Mormon Tenets Taught in the Public Schools," New York Times, December 14, 1904.
127
"Mormons Arraign Heretics: Church Finds Three University Faculty Guilty of Teaching
Modernism," New York Times, February 21, 1911.
"religious or political considerations" affected the university president's decision to fire

four faculty and demote a fifth. Although the church could not be blamed directly, the

Chicago Daily Tribune made much of the fact that the affected professors were all non-

Mormons.128

This vicious enforcement of irrational Mormon doctrine resulted, in the eyes of

non-Mormons, in a social backwardness that separated the Saints from the rest of

America. As presented to Gentile readers, Mormons rejected the best products of

American intellectual and social progress, choosing instead to adhere to outmoded

patterns of thought and behavior. Like the illiterate and superstitious converts who

swelled their ranks the Mormons were, not to put too fine a point on it, hicks.

The "unfortunate Mormon bishop" in Edward Moffatt's 1914 comic novel The
1 90

Desert and Mrs. Ajax is a case in point. The Mormons are part and parcel of Moffatt's

rural Western setting, defining the landscape in much the same way as canyons and

sagebrush. Bishop Moroni Sorenson is the only committed member of the church that

Moffatt's main characters—a troupe of Gentile circus performers—meet during the

course of the novel, and he is hardly a flattering representative. A "gaunt, bleak

individual, very loosely jointed and sallow," the bishop resembles "a hard-faced

daguerreotype of Civil War times." The bishop is not only unattractive, but fifty years out

of date. He calls on the young women from the circus in worn, ill-fitting, old-fashioned

"14 Professors Strike in Utah: Quit State University because of Treatment Accorded
Colleagues," Chicago Daily Tribune, March 19, 1915.
129
New York: Moffatt, Yard, and Company. Online at http://www.google.com/books. Quote in
untitled advertisement, New York Times, April 25, 1914.
 101

clothes, smiling "yellowly" and eyeing the pretty young women appraisingly.130 The

bishop tries to charm the ladies in homely, "drawling" English, and then preaches

disjointedly about the truths contained in the Book of Mormon. His attempt at

proselytizing allows Moffatt to make fun of what he regards as some of the more

fantastic episodes in that text, and to draw attention to language it shares with the Bible in

what is undoubtedly a nod to Mark Twain's description of the Book of Mormon as "a

prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a

tedious plagiarism of the New Testament."131 The young women finally cannot contain

their amusement at the bishop's ridiculous person and his religious views and burst into

uncontrollable laughter. The supremely inarticulate Mormon, unable to marshal a

1 '29

response, can only storm off, "one red, clenched fist brandished impotently in the air."

Interestingly, this character is no terrifying Danite—he is powerless in the face of a

gaggle of laughing Gentile girls.

Such backwardness appeared in the real world in the form of Mormon refusals to

participate in the nation's fashions and amusements. The New York Times, for example,

pointedly reported President Joseph F. Smith's remarks on women's clothing, only noting

the Church's semi-annual conference in 1913 to repeat his condemnation of "women's

present-day dress" as "abominable and indecent." The paper paraphrased Smith as

130
178. Twenty-five years after the Manifesto, Moffatt explicitly associates contemporary
Mormonism with polygamy. When one of the Gentile women inquires, "Is he a Mormon?", the answer is
clear: "You bet! And the very biggest of the lot! [...] They say he's married to every woman in his Stake!"
(179)
131
Moffatt, 180-84. Twain, Roughing It, 110. Moffatt makes his debt to Twain abundantly clear
when he has one of his characters laughingly declare that she would prefer chloroform to the Mormon
Book of Ether (186). In Roughing It, Twain famously labeled the Book of Mormon "chloroform in print"
(110).
 102

declaring that "tight and diaphanous skirts originated among the lowest classes of women

in degenerate cities," and expressing his hope that young Latter-day Saint women would
• 1 ^

avoid such fashions. Three years later the Times reported again on Smith's comments

on the subject, this time under the headline "Mormon Attacks Fashion: President Smith

Says Women's Garb Is Shameful and Suggestive."134 What might have passed for

ignorance in Moffatt's novel looks, in the Times, more like the fiery condemnation of one

of Harry Leon Wilson's characters in The Lions of the Lord, who classes everything from

the newest fashions to American (Gentile) factory-made furniture, china, cloth, and soap

as "persuasions of Satan" that will tempt people down "the sinful path of worldliness."135

Thus even the Mormons' clothing choices and spending habits—dictated by the Prophet

on high—could be used as further evidence that the Mormons were un-American.

American Mormons: "[NJever was the natural readiness of the American pioneer

more luminously displayed."136

While non-Mormon Americans primarily viewed the Mormons as a threat and an

embarrassment during this period, no observer could deny that the church had been

remarkably successful since its removal to the West. In spite of the death of their

founding prophet—the end of most new religions—the group had survived and indeed

thrived, growing from approximately 30,000 members in 1840 to 205,000 in 1890. They

"Mormons Condemn Tight Skirts," New York Times, October 5, 1913.

April 10, 1916.
364-65. Quotes on 365.
Wilson, 139.
 103

were well on their way to half a million members by the end of this period.137 The

community had endured an exodus unparalleled in American history, finally settling in

what to all appearances was a desolate desert and making it bloom. Through the

intelligence and ingenuity of their leaders, particularly Brigham Young, and the hard

work and dedication of the faithful, the Mormons had truly pioneered the settlement of

the vast intermountain West—an accomplishment that most Americans celebrated even

as they scoffed at Mormon religion and society and frankly looked forward to the day

that this anti-modern and undemocratic community would, it was widely believed,

inevitably disappear.

As Americans defused Mormonism's insidious power by assuring themselves of

its imminent death, even the religion's more questionable beliefs and behaviors, like

polygamy, inspired interest. For many, the Mormons became a fetish and a commodity.

This was nowhere more in evidence that at the great Columbian Exposition of 1893, the

Chicago's World's Fair. Though the Saints regarded the Fair as an opportunity "of

disabusing generally people's minds of what they considered] many errors regarding the

Mormons," their opportunities for display were limited.138 The Mormon Tabernacle

Choir's appearances at the Fair made headlines, and their performance of "The Star

Spangled Banner" and a pioneer song on Utah's day at the Fair took top billing over even

Rodney Stark, "The Rise of a New World Faith," Review of Religious Research 26, no. 1 (Sep.,
1984), 18-27. Membership figures in Table 2, p. 22.
138
"Work of the Women: Review of What They Are Doing for the World's Fair," Chicago Daily
Tribune, January 30, 1892.
 104

Church President Wilford Woodruffs remarks. But while the Mormons sought to

participate in the Fair's groundbreaking World's Parliament of Religions—which

featured representatives of such distant and, to the minds of most nineteenth-century

Americans, outlandish religions as India's Hinduism—they were excluded. The Fair's

organizers and promoters relegated the Mormons to the status of entertainment, hosting

the Tabernacle Choir on the Fair's stages and seeking artifacts of Mormon history for the

midway.140 Their attempts to purchase the Saints' first temple, at Kirtland, Ohio, and

have the building transported to Chicago and put on display were unsuccessful.141 But

organizers did secure a press on which the first edition of the Book of Mormon was said

to have been printed.142 Not allowed to speak of their faith, the Mormons were reduced to

serving as an amusement for curious fairgoers.

Americans relegated Mormonism to an innocuous sideshow well beyond the

grounds of the World's Fair. In 1892, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported that a former

prisoner and barber at the Utah State Penitentiary—which had recently held hundreds of

Mormon men convicted of "unlawful cohabitation"—wrote to circus promoter P.T.

Barnum offering to sell him a six-foot long watch guard made from hair and long

"To Scranton Choral: First Grand Eisteddfod Prize for Choirs Is Given," September 9, 1893;
"Utah Celebrates Its Fair Day: Prominent Mormons Take Part in Program in Festival Hall," Chicago Daily
Tribune, September 10, 1893.
140
"Mormon Church Is Aggrieved: Elder Roberts Denounces the Parliament Leaders Because He
Was Not Heard," Chicago Daily Tribune, September 28, 1893. A later review of Rev. H.R. Haweis's two-
volume memoir Travel and Talk notes that Haweis, himself the Anglican rector of St. James, London, and a
participant in the World's Parliament of Religions, criticized the organizers' decision: "In summing up the
effects of the parliament of religions he says the gravest blunder was the exclusion of the Mormons," "Two
Volumes of Reminiscences by the Rev. H.R. Haweis," Chicago Daily Tribune, December 30, 1896. For a
full discussion of Mormon participation and exclusion in the 1893 World's Fair.
141
"Would Exhibit the First Mormon Temple," Chicago Daily Tribune, April 11, 1891.
142
"He Printed the Mormon Bible," New York Times, June 18, 1893.
 105

whiskers shorn from prominent Saints when they entered the penitentiary.143 Both the

Tribune and the New York Times informed readers in 1900 of prominent entertainer

"Buffalo Bill" Cody's plans for a "Mormon City" on his property in Wyoming. Cody

declared that his interest in the Mormons was "purely of a commercial nature," and the

Mormons would put their agricultural skills to use cultivating his land. (The article does

not note whether Cody intended to charge a fee to curious tourists wishing to enter his

metropolis.)144 Chicago residents discovered, in 1910, that they could observe the world's

"freak religions" in a downtown skyscraper that, in addition to the Mormons, reportedly

rented worship space to such "cults" as Bahais, Spiritualists, Theosophists, Chinese and

Japanese Buddhists, and the followers of an Indian Swami.145 Mormon religion appeared

here not as a danger, but as an entertainment on par with bearded ladies and Siamese

twins.

While non-Mormons generally did not respect Mormonism as a religion or its

influence in the Saints' society, some defended the Mormons' rights as Americans to

practice even their foolish religion. As early as 1893, for example, Theodore Roosevelt,

then famous primarily for his role in the Spanish-American War, declared that "there is

nothing more un-American than to oppose a man because of his creed or birthplace."146 A

Chicago Daily Tribune editorial published in 1902 took the people of Kentucky to task

143
"Museum of Letters: A Curious Selection of Those Sent to P.T. Barnum," January 17, 1892.
The man also claimed that the watch guard contained the hair of "a noted Mormon's second wife."
144
"Will Found a Mormon City: Buffalo Bill Says 30,000 Will Leave Salt Lake and Settle on His
Land in Wyoming," Chicago Daily Tribune, February 27, 1900; "Buffalo Bill's Mormon Scheme," New
York Times, March 3, 1900.
145
"Freak Religions from All over the World Find Homes in One Chicago Skyscraper: From
Orient and Occident the Members of Many Fantastic Faiths Gather in the Masonic Temple Where They
Worship Strange Gods and Perform Weird Ceremonies," Chicago Daily Tribune, February 6, 1910.
146
'"Americanism and Immigration,'" Chicago Daily Tribune, January 21, 1893.
 106

for recent assaults on a local Mormon congregation, deploring the Gentiles' "violation of
7
the inalienable rights of man." Two years later during a 1909 tour of the country,

President Taft proclaimed to a crowd of Californians that he had seen the spirit of the

distinctive American race all over the West, "even in Utah, among the Mormons."148

Finally, if perhaps somewhat surprisingly for Taft's Gentile audience, the Mormons were

acknowledged as part of the American people.

During the same years the Mormons became collectible. As one book dealer

noted, "a growing number of book collectors [we]re devoted solely to this subject."149

The most sought-after items were artifacts directly connected with the development of the

Mormon community: copies of the first edition of the Book of Mormon and an 1849 gold

coin issued in the Utah territory under Brigham Young. While the coins were valuable in

and of themselves as gold, auction notices made the most of the Mormon connection by

listing unique symbols in the design including a "bishop's mitre," an "all-seeing eye,"

and the inscription "Holiness to the Lord."150 First editions of the Book of Mormon were

often the least expensive things at the auctions in which they were sold, but they

continued to appear at sales no doubt because of people's interest in Mormonism. Near

the end of the period, buyers and sellers began to acknowledge the book's place in

1
"Contempt for Inalienable Rights," editorial, Chicago Daily Tribune, June 18, 1902.
Ms < T a f t a t t h e G a t e w a y o f t n e Yosemite," New York Times, October 7, 1909 and "Taft to Revel in
Yosemite's Glory," Chicago Daily Tribune, October 7, 1909. Italics added. Both articles quote this
statement in full.
149
"Book Exchange" classified advertisement, April 13, 1907.
150 « j 0 g e jj pyj-g Q0\d Coins: Offering of California and Colorado Specimens Struck at the
Mines," May 25, 1908; "Rare Gold Coins Sold: Fifty-Dollar California Pioneer Piece Knocked Down for
$310," June 6, 1911.
 5
American history, listing it "[a]mong the Americana." Whether the buyers were

Gentiles or Mormons, auctions of Mormon artifacts interested non-Mormons enough to

warrant auctions in major American cities and coverage in national newspapers.

Scholars also began to take more serious notice of the Mormons, as evidenced by

William Alexander Linn's much praised and often-reviewed 1902 history and I.

Woodbridge Riley's 1903 psychological biography of Joseph Smith. In 1910, John

Lomax, the great scholar of American folk music and culture, issued a request to readers

of The New York Times for assistance in tracking down traditional American ballads. His

list of examples included "a canalboating song," "a cowboy trail song," "a railroad song,'

"an early settler's song," "a gold-seeker's song," and "a Mormon song," clearly classing

the Saints among the icons of American westward expansion. Lomax included his titles

and institutional affiliations in the notice, leaving readers in no doubt that this was a

serious request from credentialed scholar.152 Finally, in 1914, the study of Mormonism

entered the inner sanctum of the American academy when Harvard University purchased

a library of more than 2,600 Mormon-related materials including books, rare pamphlets,
1 S^

and papers for its research collections.

The nation's more serious interest in the Saints was based not on their religion,

but on their society which, despite frequent cries of the Mormons' theocratic

151
"Books of a Writer Offered for Sale," November 14, 1915. In 1920, an auction advertisement
extended this designation to a "collection of Mormon items" ("Exhibitions and Sales at the Anderson
Galleries," advertisement, October 12, 1920).
152
"Views of Readers: A Quest for American Ballads," May 14, 1910. At the time, Lomax was
both Associate Professor at Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (now Texas A & M) and the
Sheldon Fellow for the Investigation of American Ballads at Harvard University.
153
"Buys Library on Mormons: E. H. Pierce Collection is Acquired by Harvard University," New
York Times, May 21, 1914.
intermingling of religion in politics, business, and society generally, complimentary

observers saw as distinct from the Church. Such observers universally praised the

Mormons' industrious development of the West. As one visitor marveled, "Among the

Mormons in California, in the Rocky Mountains, and generally in all the region of the

West, development has assumed proportions that can hardly be imagined."154 With land-

hungry Americans looking to the vast unsettled deserts of the intermountain region, the

Saints' dry farming techniques became the model to follow.155 Admiring Gentiles even

praised Brigham Young:

[I]t is no exaggeration to describe him as great. It was no ordinary task

which this man performed. He led his people not across a desert to a fertile
land beyond, but into the desert's heart, and there established and
maintained them in a degree of material prosperity that amazed all who
understood the conditions with which the Mormon colony had to contend.
He was the first man in this country to see what could be done with the
sterile lands of the West by means of an extensive and intelligent system
of irrigation, and all that has since been done in that direction is simply an
imitation of the plans which Brigham Young devised and carried out with
such brilliant success.156

The Mormons' religious oddities and political defiance could be set aside in order to

praise their accomplishments as the vanguard of American settlement of the Western

frontier.

"A Frenchman's View of Us: M. Paul Deschanel's Impressions of a Recent Visit to the United
States," Chicago Daily Tribune, May 22, 1892.
155
See, for example, "Will Irrigate Indian Lands," Chicago Daily Tribune, July 25, 1891;
"Colonies for the Far West: Surplus Population of the East to Settle on Arid Western Lands," Chicago
Daily Tribune, April 22, 1895; William E. Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (New York: The
MacMillan Company, 1905). Online at http://books.google.com/; and "East Fights West at the Land
Show," New York Times, November 4, 1911.
156
"Topics of the Times," editorial, New York Times, February 20, 1897. See also "Young,
Mormon Church Head, First to Irrigate West: Alva Adams Tells Land Congress Religious Sect Head Was
Pioneer in Arid Alfalfa Culture," Chicago Daily Tribune, November 20, 1909.
 109

These remarkable accomplishments were, of course, the result of traits the

Mormons shared with the best Americans. Most American observers praised the Mormon

pioneers for personal characteristics like intelligence, hard work, and thrift. The

Mormons were successful pioneers because they were models of Yankee ingenuity.

Gentiles saw keen intelligence in the planning and construction of Mormon farms and

communities as well as the careful management of limited resources. The Saints'

willingness to labor became legendary and every account of the Mormon story featured

descriptions of the Mormons hard at work. Novelist Harry Leon Wilson praised Brigham

Young for inspiring his people by toiling alongside them in the earliest days of Deseret.

Traveler Frances Merriam's described Mormon farmers and their neat, picturesque fields

in the 1890s. These hardworking Mormon pioneers set an example of thrift for the

nation in an era of increasing materialism, willing as they were to deny themselves

pleasures rather than incur debts.158 This smart, careful husbandry built prosperous

settlements like Logan, Utah, "a green and restful paradise in a great flat valley of

unsympathetic stubble land."159 The Mormon pioneer story celebrated Americans' smarts

and can-do spirit, and confirmed the widespread belief that in this democratic nation

anyone who was willing to work hard could achieve real success in the form of such

orderly material prosperity.

Wilson, Lions of the Lord, 145. Merriam, My Summer in a Mormon Village (Boston, MA:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1894), 25. Online at http://www.google.com/books.
158
See My Summer in a Mormon Village, 34; "Utah Flourishing: The Gold Mines Being Actively
Work and the People Contented and Law-Abiding," New York Times, January 6, 1898. Reprint from the
Cincinnati Commercial Tribune; "Roosevelt on Tour of Idaho: Finds Expansion and Prosperity Leading
Characteristics of People There," Chicago Daily Tribune, September 20, 1900.
159
"Roosevelt in Land of Mormon," Chicago Daily Tribune, September 21, 1900.
 110

The Western wonders associated with the Saints were not limited to irrigation

canals and productive farmland: Salt Lake City, "the Mormon Capital," was lauded in

most descriptions of the Mormons' remarkable accomplishments. Discussions of the

Western landscape often celebrated natural elements, agricultural achievements, and

unique Mormon buildings together in a jumble of worthwhile sights. For example one

speaker, delivering a lecture on "The Rocky Mountains and Great Basin" to an audience

at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in 1896, outlined the

geological history of the Western United States and the wondrous possibilities of modern

irrigation in the desert alongside a description (illustrated with slides) of such sites as

Brigham Young's Beehive House, the Tabernacle, and the Temple.160 As the railroad

carried more and more visitors to the West, Salt Lake City joined the Pacific Ocean and

Yosemite in guides and travelogues as the key destinations for American tourists eager to

experience the nation's beauties.161

The familiarity that came with increasing Gentile travel to Utah resulted not, as

the adage would have it, in greater contempt, but rather contributed to the nation's

growing respect for Mormons. The Mormons stood, in the mind of one traveler, as the

earliest example of the "invincible American optimism" that settled the Western

deserts. Musing, "[i]t is hard for the stranger to make out how a people so peculiar are

not more peculiar," he noted that many Gentiles who did business with the Saints had

"nothing but good to say of them as men of ideas, as men of affairs, and as fair dealers."

160
"Our Western Wonders," New York Times, March 15, 1896.
161
See, for example, "Visit to the Yosemite Valley: Interesting Description Furnished by
Baltimore Traveler," reprint from Baltimore Sun, Chicago Daily Tribune, July 9, 1893.
162
Montgomery Schuyler, "Westward the Course of Empire: A Panorama of Our Country in Eight
Daily Tableaus As Seen by a Traveler on the Los Angeles Limited," New York Times, January 14, 1906.
 Ill

But in the end, this praise indicated not that the Mormons had been decent folk all along,

but that they were becoming less Mormon: "Mormonism is doomed, in spite of all the

specious showings it can make for itself. A peculiar people can remain peculiar only by

detachment and isolation, and must merge now that it has been fairly caught up with."163

With such all-American abilities, the Mormons could not long remain attached to their

un-American religion.

This story of Americanization appeared frequently in fiction of this period as the

rescue of victimized Mormons by a heroic Gentile. Such captivity narratives figured

heavily in standard anti-Mormon narratives throughout the nineteenth century.164 But

during the early twentieth century the story began to change. Early novels focus on

unwitting or unwilling Gentile converts, many of whom end up dead rather than rescued.

Later stories featured characters who found a way out of Mormonism through spiritual

inspiration rather than by force: in 1899, Lily Dougall's heroine found the strength to

escape through the hope that her Gentile true love might take her back (he does); in

Mara, published in 1902, the title character got away from her secretly polygamous

husband through reading the New Testament; and in Wilson's 1903 epic The Lions of the

Lord, the New Testament inspired the spiritual escape of the main character. A lifelong

Saint, however, Wilson's hero is not strong enough to escape physically. Only his foster

daughter—a Gentile who survived the Mountain Meadows Massacre—makes it out alive.

163
Schuyler, "Westward the Course of Empire," January 28, 1906.
164
See Givens, Viper, 42-43, 106-107, and 153-57. As Givens notes, the captivity narrative was
employed in stories that featured a variety of American minorities as the villains, for example: Indians,
Shakers, and particularly Roman Catholics. For a detailed exploration of Indian and Roman Catholic
capture narratives in nineteenth-century American fiction, see Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The
Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Roman Catholicism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1994, esp. Part Two, "American Protestantism and Its Captivities."
 112

Popular Western writer Zane Grey made a habit of saving Gentile characters

raised by Mormons from the clutches of their adopted faith. This storyline figures

prominently in his first big hit, Riders of the Purple Sage, but unlike earlier writers Grey

also used his classic Western and its sequel to tell the story of a "born Mormon" who

fights free of the clutches of Utah Mormonism.165 Jane Withersteen is forced to flee her

home in southern Utah when her refusal to become the plural wife of a local Mormon

leader brings her into conflict with the priesthood. In the face of Church leaders'

persecution, Withersteen loses the "Mormon blindness" that had allowed her to deny the

viciousness of her Church. With the scales removed from her eyes, she finally escapes

not just with her soul intact but with mind and body as well. Grey does not fully redeem

Withersteen in Riders of the Purple Sage, which ends with her walled up in a remote

valley with no outlet. But in The Rainbow Trail, set twelve years after Riders of the

Purple Sage, a young man comes West in search of the hidden valley and its captive

inmates.166 Jane Withersteen is finally allowed to join the Gentile world, proving that

even born Mormons could find their way out of their misguided religion.

Then, in 1911 and 1912, the Mexican Revolution caught the nation's attention as

Mexican rebels killed foreign colonists with absolutely no concern for their religious

affiliations.167 Reports began to label individuals and communities both "Mormon" and

"American," but the words were often separated in the text. The case of one murdered

165
Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage: A Novel, illustrated by Douglas Duer (New York:
Grosset & Dunlap Publishers by arrangement with Harper & Brothers, 1912), 150.
166
New York: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, 1915. Online at http://www.google.com/books.
167
"Americans Flee from Chihuahua: Hundreds Reach El Paso, Driven by Threats of Slaughter by
Rebel Leaders," New York Times, July 30, 1912; "Warned by Knox, Orozco Is Defiant: Mexican Rebel
Leader Says He Will Disarm All Foreigners in the Insurrecto Zone," New York Times, July 31, 1912.
 113

colonist is illustrative: "William Adams, an American citizen, was killed two days ago as

he stood on his doorstep in Colonia Diaz, the Mormon colony." Such statements are even

somewhat ambiguous: is the American a Mormon, or did he just happen to live in the

Mormon colony? (But then, what Gentile American would live in a Mormon colony?)

Like the rebels, the Mormons made no such fine distinctions: an agent of the Mormon

colony sent a telegram to Senator Reed Smoot warning, "Conditions unsettled and no

guarantee of protection to Americans where there is a question between Americans" and

Mexicans. The Saints understood that the rebels were not interested in their religion,

but wanted them gone or dead because they viewed Mormons simply as Americans.

This understanding finally dawned on non-Mormon Americans in late 1912. As

killings continued and Mormon colonists abandoned all their worldly possessions and

fled north across the U. S. border, Governor Hunt of Arizona informed The New York

Times that while American residents of southern Arizona feared for their safety, "[sjtill

more deplorable than these conditions [we]re the circumstances under which hundreds of

American Mormon refugees [...] were compelled to flee."169 From early 1913 on, the

papers routinely referred to the threat Mexican rebels posed to "American Mormon"

colonists and settlements, and when the two identifiers were not listed together the

American status of individuals and communities took precedence.170 Reports occasionally

171

even failed to mention if the American victims were Mormon or not.

168
"American Killed at His Door," New York Times, July 5, 1912.
169
"Situation Grave, Hunt Says: Governor of Arizona Tells the Times Mexican Rebels Endanger
Americans," New York Times, September 10, 1912. Italics added.
170
See, for example, "Mormon Town Rebel Camp," New York Times, March 2, 1913; "Report
Villa Desertions: Carranzistas Announcement Promptly Denied by the Other Side," New York Times,
October 12, 1915; "Villa Frees Men He Reported Slain," New York Times, November 6, 1915; "Reports
 114

Finally, in March of 1916, President Woodrow Wilson ordered the U.S. Army to

enter Mexico and stop the Mexican rebels. As the military—and the media—advanced

into Mexico, the Chicago Daily Tribune returned to the standard praise of Mormon

pioneers, but with a new twist: "There in Mexico in that occupation the Mormons

represent not a people with whom government has had trouble, but a people of the stock
1 79

that can maintain order, make progress, and use the earth." In other words, the

Mormons were wonderful Americans and the past is forgiven.

But this change did not stick. While non-Mormon Americans may have learned to

count Saints as among "us," when facing a common enemy, the Mormons could still be

put in their place when necessary. The media frequently praised the work of Mormon

scouts in the American military expedition until one of those scouts—a colonist with the

quaintly Western name Lem Spillsbury—failed to reinforce the official American

narrative of a disastrous engagement between American troops and Mexican government

forces that resulted in the death of an American captain and a number of his soldiers, and

the capture of the rest of the American contingent. How to explain that "[fjhough an

American by birth, he shows a tendency to put the blame on our own soldiers and

exculpate the Mexicans"? By reminding readers that Spillsbury was a Mormon—and the

worst kind of Mormon, too: a polygamist. An editorial in The New York Times argued

that "the leaning may be explained as a result of grievances, as a Mormon, against the

Americans Were Slain by Villa: Two Mormons Believed to Have Been Killed in Chihuahua—Bandit at
Nogales," New York Times, March 9, 1916; "Latest News of Mexican War," Chicago Daily Tribune,
March 16, 1916; "Two Men Tell of Seeing Villa and His Plans," Chicago Daily Tribune, March 17, 1916.
171
See, for example, "Lansing to Rush a Report on Mexico: [...] Massacre Details Told," New
York Times, January 16, 1916.
172
"A Little Garden in Mexico," editorial, March 25,1916.
 115

American Government."173 A few days later the paper reinforced this representation of

Spillsbury as law-defying and un-American by publishing a photograph of an unnamed

Mormon scout with "his family of three wives and two children."174

While Spillsbury's American status may have been called into question, however,

continuing skirmishes along the U.S.-Mexico border between Americans and the

Mexican rebels kept other Mormons "American"—at least in the news. Spillsbury even

redeemed himself to some extent, going out in search of the Mexican bandits who

kidnapped and killed four American cowboys—three Mormons and one African

American.175 But his punishment—the loss of the label American—remained in place, as

in at least one article he was "Lem Spillsbury, Mormon scout," while the Mormon
11ft

victims—who were also refugees from Mexican colonies—were "American cowboys."

"American Mormons" remained at the edge of the national culture, acknowledged as part

of America only when the United States faced an outside threat and only as long as the

Saints adhered to the narrative demanded by the majority. On the eve of the United

States' entry into World War I, the Saints' status as Americans was conditional.

173 " j 0 p i c s 0 f m e Times: A Remarkable Amount of Agreement," June 30, 1916.

174
Untitled, July 4, 1916.
175
"Four Americans Held in Mexico; Ransom Asked?" Chicago Daily Tribune, February 15,
1917; "Finds 3 Americans Slain by Mexicans: Pershing's Scout Convinced They Were Seized This Side of
the Boundary," New York Times, February 16, 1917.
176
"Mexicans Murder 3 Americans," February 16, 1917.
 116

Chapter 3

Making Peace?: Moderating Stereotypes, 1917-1942

The nation first embraced "American Mormons" in response to the Saints'

sufferings during the Mexican Revolution prior to World War I. The Mormons'

dedication to the nation during World War I cemented this newfound respect. While

Mexican colonists reminded Americans of the Saints' unmatched ability as pioneers on

the Western frontier, the Church's and community's commitment to the war effort proved

them willing to sacrifice for the benefit of the nation. The Church satisfied the nation of

its loyalty in a grand gesture in 1918, donating its grain stores—more than a quarter of a

million barrels of wheat saved for the Latter-day Saints against the possibility of future

famine—to the United States government.1 Such dedication to the national good did not

go unnoticed, and one short story, printed in the Chicago Daily Tribune, noted, "Strange

are these Mormons, and not a bad sort to mix with. They are hospitable and they are

patriotic. What they have taken from America they have taken in trade for their sweat and

their blood and their pride and their convictions. But they are willing to give freely of
9 • •

their goods and their sons and their souls' spirit to the nation." Devotion to the nation

above all else—even their Church—seemed to prove that Mormons could put their

religion in its proper place, subordinate to the law and social norms, and be good

Americans.
1
"Mormons Give Up Wheat: Church Turns over Reserve of 250,000 Barrels to Government,"
New York Times, June 12, 1918. Unless otherwise noted, all newspaper citations in this chapter are from the
Proquest Historical Newspaper Database. Accessed via the Boston University Libraries, online at
http://www.bu.edu/libraries.
2
Jack Lait, "Strayed—One Folly: How Bernice of the Chorus Became a Latter Day Saint,"
Chicago Daily Tribune, December 9, 1917.
 117

But while Americans embraced the Mormons' seemingly newfound patriotism

and willingness to sacrifice for the good of the nation, they did not approve of the Saints'

ongoing devotion to their peculiar beliefs. Accounts of the Saints highlighted their

differences from most Americans, focusing more on their past than on their present and

emphasizing former issues like polygamy, violent conflicts with non-Mormons, and the

actual theocratic merger of Church and state in the Kingdom of Deseret. While Gentiles

generally accepted that polygamy was a thing of the past, they thrilled to a continuing

supply of books and movies that recalled the terrible practice in titillating detail. The

Mountain Meadows massacre, that greatest proof of Mormon hatred and violence toward

Gentiles, also became a fabled piece of frontier history. But even as authors explained the

massacre as in part the result of Mormon fears born of decades of persecution, Americans

continued to exaggerate the history of Mormon attacks on Gentiles and the actual size

and power of the Danites. Young was still a tyrannical dictator—albeit one whose control

of his people enabled their brilliant colonization of the desert. The contemporary Prophet

was not such an autocrat only because his own humility and good judgment prevented

him from exercising the full power of his office. And as for the Mormons' religious

beliefs, the best that non-Mormon America seemed able to do was to refrain from

discussing ongoing revelation and temple rituals. Such subjects, if not avoided, inevitably

led to quizzical disbelief or, worse, mocking scorn.

Between 1917 and 1942 the nation confronted the first World War and the Great

Depression, as well as the lead up to World War II. Americans desperate to unite in the

face of such challenges were willing to deemphasize many of the Saints' most irritating
 118

beliefs and practices as long as the Mormons continued to prove their patriotism. In many

ways the Mormons accepted the nation's terms and only pressed those beliefs and

practices on the public notice that conformed to wider American and Protestant ideas of

what a citizen and a Christian should be, helping non-Mormon Americans set aside their

differences. By the end of the period, the nation celebrated Mormon pioneer

achievements with monuments, marked trails, guided tours, and epic movies. But when

confronted with the ideas and actions that inspired nineteenth-century persecution that the

Saints were depicted in such popular entertainments as suffering nobly, contemporary

Americans continued to view the Mormons as a people set apart by their own misguided

religious beliefs and the way they allowed the peculiarities of that religion to intrude into

the political, economic, and social arenas where Americans believed they did not belong.

Religion: "We are generally accused of being ignorant people[.]"3

In March 1918, just before the Saints earned national approbation by donating

their grain stores to the federal government for the war effort, the great revivalist Billy

Sunday preached to a Chicago audience that Americans had become a nation of religious

hypocrites: "They don't mind hearing about the sins of Europe, or the sins of the

Mormons, but they don't want to hear anything about the sins in their own flat, or their

own sins or anything that they may be doing in the world."4 Sunday did not mean to

acquit the Mormons of their sins. He simply meant to chastise those Americans who

3
"Mormon Campaign Here: Expect to Dissipate Misunderstandings in the East," New York Times,
April 1, 1923. Quoting Le Roy C. Snow of the Eastern States Mission of the Latter-day Saints,
headquartered in New York City.
4
"Brimstone for Hypocrites (Night Sermon)," Chicago Daily Tribune, March 23, 1918.
 119

preferred to focus on others' faults rather than their own. The Mormons—like the people

of Europe whose Old World decadence and corruption had brought about the Great

War—remained a valid and popular target for any preacher looking to stir up an

audience.

Scholars, too, continued to demean Mormon religious ideas. Henry K. Rowe, a

Professor of History and Sociology at the Newton Theological Institute near Boston,

presented the Saints as an impediment to American social and religious progress. Rowe

saw American history as the progressive emancipation of the individual: from the

authority of state religion, particularly the institutionalism of the Old World; from

worship characterized by formal rituals, which was being replaced by the emotional

freedom of evangelical Christianity; and from the orthodoxy of Calvinist Protestantism.5

But Mormonism deviated from this trend, embodying false revelation, "communistic

experiments," and an institutional authority that wielded the power to "foist polygamy

upon [adherents] as a part of a revealed ecclesiastical and social system."6 This "alien

religion" represented "a state within a state" where leaders exercised total control over

their members even to telling them who and how many they should marry. (In his zeal

against Mormon anti-modernism, Rowe failed to inform his readers that the Mormons

abandoned polygamy more than thirty years earlier.) According to Rowe, the Church

controlled members' economic and social lives through their irrational belief that their

Prophet talked to God.

5
The History of Religion in the United States, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924), viii.
6
Rowe, 116, 117.
 Critics of Mormonism continued to target the primary example of continuing

revelation, the Book of Mormon. In 1921, the publisher of the Cambridge History of

American Literature declared that while an entry on Mary Baker Eddy's Science and

Health with Key to the Scriptures would be replaced in response to complaints by

Christian Scientists that the entry demeaned their faith, the essay on the Book of Mormon

would remain because, he asserted in spite of the Mormons' widely reported continuing

growth, "the case was different, because Mormonism was dead."7 The head of the

Mormons' Eastern States mission responded with a formal letter of protest to the editors

of the volume, and shortly thereafter the publisher agreed to substitute a different essay

for the one penned by Joseph Smith biographer I. Woodbridge Riley (who had written in

1903 that Smith's revelations were the combined product of ambition and mental
o

instability). But one reviewer who had access to the original essay declared the change

almost meaningless, noting that the content of the two entries was virtually the same and

that both were unflattering to the Mormons. The only improvement he could see, at least

from the perspective of faithful Mormons, was that the new entry lacked the "satirical

attitude" that Riley employed in his essay.9

Writers also returned to the man behind the Book of Mormon, rehashing and

reinterpreting the life and work of the prophet Joseph Smith. Some subscribed to the

theories advanced twenty years before that Smith was insane. Others maintained that he

was simply a crook. Some extended an olive branch to the Mormons by putting Smith's
7
"Stop Sale of Book Deriding Mrs. Eddy," New York Times, April 19, 1921.
8
"Mormons Protest against New Book," New York Times, April 24, 1921.
9
William Lyon Phelps, "American Thought Foremost in Cambridge History," rev. of The
Cambridge History of American Literature, W. P. Trent, J. Erskine, S. P. Sherman, and C. Van Doren, eds.
(New York: G. P. Putnam Sons, 1921).
 121

life and work into a broader historical context, declaring his visions a symptom of the

"quackery" that gave rise to a wide variety of American "cults and manias" in the

nineteenth century.10 But once again all agreed that Smith's experiences were the work of

either a con-artist or a madman, and therefore the religion he founded was invalid.

William Warren Sweet, the eminent historian of religion in the United States,

published his groundbreaking The Story of Religions in America in 1930. Sweet accords

the Mormons just four pages in keeping with their relatively small size—he reports a total

of just over 600,000 Mormons in 1926, as compared with four million Jews and 18.6

million Catholics—which are almost entirely devoted to the period before Smith's death

in 1844.12 Citing William Alexander Linn's heavily biased history of Mormonism and

Ruth and Reginald Kauffman's study of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

as a capitalist enterprise, he began his entry on the Mormons with a quote: "Mormonism

sprouted in the revival-singed soil of Seneca county, western New York, among an

uncouth and unstable people pitifully eager for signs and wonders."13 Sweet further

emphasized the poverty—intellectual as well as financial—of the Smith family, noting

that Smith was "born of superstitious parents." Sweet characterized Smith's nomadic

ways as an adult as the evasion of lawsuits and criminal charges stemming from his

business activities, and of the ire of local Gentiles he threatened with violence. Like Linn,

10
Gilbert Seldes, The Stammering Century (New York: The John Day Company, 1928).
11
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1930).
12
"Appendix: Census of Religious Bodies for 1926 Gathered by the Department of Commerce,
Washington, D. C," 543-53. The total number of Latter-day Saints includes the membership both of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints. A 1923 survey by the Federal Council of Churches reported similar numbers ("1922 Banner Year
for the Churches," New York Times, April 1, 1923).
13
397.
 122

he never acknowledged any unprovoked violence on the part of non-Mormons. He did

describe various theories of the origins of the Book of Mormon without taking sides, but

declared that "whatever the origin of the Book of Mormon, Smith and his new revelation

were soon accepted as genuine by numerous followers."14 But then he ended his entry by

noting that "[fjrom the beginning a large proportion of the converts have come from

outside the United States."15 Thus the entry begins and ends with the long-standing

images of the Mormons as a group of credulous fools—many of whom were not even

American—accepting a dubious set of religious ideas from a man prone to superstition as

well as to criminal behavior.

Popular historian Bernard DeVoto regarded the success of Mormonism as a

purely frontier phenomenon, arguing that the religion itself reflects the untidy social and

intellectual environment of the advancing frontier it followed—and carried—west

throughout the nineteenth century. Without presenting any clear evidence for the claim,

DeVoto asserted that Smith was "partly sincere and partly a charlatan," a man who

experienced delusions and then amplified them "in cold blood."16 His earliest adherents

were "the illiterate, the credulous, and the disassociated," to whom Mormonism promised

"the communal and corporate power of a society governed by one man who was

answerable to no one but God."17 Smith and his revelations appealed, then, to the

dispossessed with no hope of improving their lot on their own, who were willing to

14
398.
15
401.
16
"The Mormon Centennial: A Study in Utopia and Dictatorship," in Forays and Rebuttals
(Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company, 1936). Expanded from The American Mercury, January 1930.
Quotation on 92.
17
86, 87.
 123

accept any religion that promised them social and economic security. DeVoto, like

Sweet, did not view Smith as unique: "he was a typical product of the burnt-over region,

moody, fantastic, acutely sensitive to religious unrest."18 The Prophet and his followers

were fools and madmen, but no more so than many of their neighbors. The only thing

peculiar about Mormonism, according to DeVoto, is that it survived the death of the

frontier.

While some critics continued to target Smith as the source of most Mormon

revelations, many turned their attention away from the Mormon scriptures to the people

reading them. The primary problem, according to these observers, was not so much the

scriptures themselves as the literalism with which believers approached them. As one

biographer of Brigham Young noted, "the Mormon leaders were men with literal minds;

they determined to puzzle out exactly what the Bible meant in everything it said and to

act upon what other churches were content merely to repeat."19 Sincere though such

literalism may have been, however, most Americans did not admire it, because religions

based on literal readings of scripture "do not persuade or convince: they command: and

the religion or life sustained on such diet is static. It lacks the initiative. The reason is

suspended and atrophied."20 According to critics, this approach to religion, which

Americans were learning in the early twentieth century to associate with fundamentalist

forms of Christianity, threatened the intellectual foundations of the nation's progress.

is 9 9
19
Quoted in M. M. Quaife, review of M. R. Werner, Brigham Young (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
and Company, 1925), The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 12, no. 2 (Sep., 1925), 274-76.
20
"A Layman Confesses His Faith: Fundamental Principles of Christianity Discussed by P.
Whitwell Wilson," rev. of A Layman's Confession of Faith by P. Whitwell Wilson, New York Times,
August 10, 1924. Quoting Wilson.
 124

Well known lawyer Clarence Darrow warned Protestant Americans against the perils of

literal interpretations even of their own Bible:

By the elimination of the learning on any subject from any source other
than the Bible, any religious establishment which happens to be in the
majority can gain control of the minds of the children in the public
schools. If perchance the majority somewhere should not be a Christian
majority, the Koran or the Book of Mormon or any other, might equally
well be set up as a standard of truth, knowledge, and scientific learning.21

Thus the threat came full circle: Americans condemned Mormonism for their literalism,

and then they illustrated the dangers of fundamentalist Christian readings of the Bible by

comparing them to dangerous outsiders like the Mormons. But in the eyes of some critics,

Mormonism was doubly dangerous, combining as it did the literal interpretation of

revealed texts with the belief in ongoing revelation.

In order to accept the Mormonism in their midst, then, non-Mormon Americans

had to find a way to ignore the Saints' belief in ongoing revelation. And ignore it they

did. When the Saints established their first stake (an organizational unit analogous to a

diocese) in New York City in 1934, The New York Times reported the event first with a

brief, dry explanation of the process, naming the new high priests and other officials and

defining the term "stake" for its readers.22 The following day the paper went further,

explaining the administration and practices associated with the new stake. In particular,

the article noted the importance of genealogical research, telling readers that Mormons

believed that "the Gospel is preached in Paradise and that those who have not heard it on

21
"Scopes's Final Plea Condemns Bigotry: Defense Counsel Files a Brief Attacking Tennessee's
Anti-Evolution Law: Fear Rule by One Sect: Zealots Violate Freedom of Conscience, It Is Charged, and
Would Make Education a Fraud," New York Times, January 5, 1926.
22
"Mormons Will Name Officials Here Today: New York Stake, Like a Diocese, to Be
Organized—15 High Priests Chosen," New York Times, December 9, 1934.
 125

earth will have the opportunity to become converts." The closest the article came to

discussing baptism for the dead, which the media had routinely mocked only thirty years

earlier, was a vague reference to "the spirits of the dead" being "honored by the Mormons

in ceremonies for their welfare."23 It avoided more controversial rituals like baptism for

the dead and celestial marriage, as well as the origin of those beliefs in Joseph Smith's

revelations.

The media also took note of the myriad Mormon monuments around the country,

which they often described as tourist destinations. The seagull monument on the grounds

of the temple in Salt Lake City was a favorite feature, but whereas the Mormons regarded

the gulls' arrival in time to save their crops from destruction by crickets as God's answer

to their prayers, the national media generally left out that part of the story. The New York

Times acknowledged in 1919 that the arrival of the seagulls was "an incident that the

Mormons look upon almost as a miracle," but only almost?* A 1927 feature explained
•yc

that the seagulls were "hungry after their long pilgrimage" from California. A 1934

article acknowledged the Mormons' faith only to dismiss it, noting that "the crickets

disregarded the prayers of the saints while the seagulls did not"—the Saints prayed but

the animals, and not God, listened.26 Writers in each case avoided engaging with beliefs

that the majority of Americans did not share, instead pushing the Mormon belief in divine

intervention to the edge of the picture if not entirely out of the frame.

23
"Mormons Set Up New 'Stake' Here: 26 High Priests Are Ordained in Church Ceremonies and
40 'Saints' Are Named," New York Times, December 10, 1934.
24
"A Salt Lake City Monument," January 19, 1919.
25
"A Monument to Gulls," New York Times, May 15, 1927.
26
"All Mormon Men Growing Beards to Honor Brigham Young and His Pioneers," New York
Times, July 22, 1934.
 The media was forced to confront Mormon beliefs at the Saints' most important

historic sites. After the Saints purchased land in 1931 in Palmyra, the site of Joseph

Smith's earliest revelations and his discovery of the Book of Mormon, The New York

Times began reporting on the Church's major activities at the site. While the monument

featuring the Angel Moroni forced the paper into uncomfortable territory by raising the

specter of Smith's visions, early coverage handled it well by telling the story "according

to Mormon tradition." But within two years, stories on the once again pushed the Saints'

beliefs aside to label Moroni the Mormons' "patron saint." After dedication ceremonies

in 1935, the Times quoted one Church official's description of the monument as an

expression of "gratitude for the gospel of Jesus" and faith in Joseph Smith's "testimony"

that "if a man die he shall live again." Thus Smith offered "testimony"—not

"revelation"—in support of the Christian scriptures and the shared Christian belief in life

after death. Without more context it is impossible to know if the Times edited the

comments to avoid references to peculiar Mormon beliefs or if the Church and its

officials were self-editing to present only those aspects of their faith that were palatable

to the non-Mormon public. Whatever the case, the newspaper continued to separate

Mormon sacred sites from their religious origins. By the end of the period, the Times

regularly reported on the Church's summer pageants at Palmyra not as a religious event

but as a regional tourist attraction, providing readers with information on area roads and

lodging.

27
"A Memorial to the Birthplace of Mormonism: The Angel Moroni Monument," New York
Times, July 14, 1935; "History of Mormons Pictured in Pageant: More than 9,000 Persons Throng Palmyra
to Celebrate the Birth of Their Faith," New York Times, July 24, 1937.
28
"Mormons Dedicate Moroni Monument," New York Times, July 22, 1935.
 127

Literally dozens of articles printed in the Chicago Daily Tribune between 1917

and 1942 responded to the primary Mormon historic site in Illinois—the city of

Nauvoo—in much the same way. Early in the period the paper focused on the revelation

that defined the Mormons during their time there: "it was here in Nauvoo that Smith [so

he said] had a revelation from on high expressly approving and encouraging

polygamy." But the paper quickly recast the city in more generic terms as the site where

part of the "fascinating story" of the Mormons took place, noting that "some important

chapters of early Illinois history were written" there.30 Eventually, the Mormons shared

their claim to the city's history and its present interest with a group of French

communists who lived there in the mid-nineteenth century, as the paper highlighted local
i i

wine and cheese festivals in addition to the Saints' history. Finally the paper

recommended Nauvoo as a tourist attraction in its regular features on weekend getaways

for Chicagoans traveling by car.32 Nauvoo, like Palmyra, was reduced to a conveniently

accessible historical site.

29
"Mormon Schism Is Forgotten to Honor Founder: Long Severed Sects Join in Nauvoo Rites,"
Chicago Daily Tribune, July 27, 1933. Insertion in original.
30
"Keokuk Dam Is Boon to Waters of Mississippi," Chicago Daily Tribune, August 9, 1936; "The
Tribune Travelers' Guide: Nauvoo Offers Land for State Historic Park," Chicago Daily Tribune, July 10,
1938.
31
Juanita Daly, "Wine-Cheese Nuptials Held in Nauvoo," Chicago Daily Tribune, September 13,
1941.
32
See "Motors—Traffic—Highways: Suggested Labor Day Weekend Tours," Chicago Daily
Tribune, August 25, 1940; "2 Million Will Take to Roads over the Weekend: Chicagoland Prepares for
Holiday Tours," Chicago Daily Tribune, September 1, 1948. Part of "Enchantment along River."
 128

Polygamy: "A lusty piece of Americana and an arousing story."33

Even before World War I, many Americans accepted the fact that widespread

Mormon polygamy was a thing of the past. As the Saints who had entered plural

marriages before and immediately after 1890 died and the Mormon community came to

be dominated by younger monogamous generations, Gentile Americans began to view

polygamy not as a terrifying menace but rather as one interesting aspect of the nation's

wild and wooly frontier history. But despite this shift from imminent threat to historical

curiosity, the outsized presence of the polygamist relative to other depictions of the

Mormons in both high and popular culture continued to set the Saints apart from the mass

of Americans. This curious aspect of the Saint's past received more attention in American

culture than their contemporary beliefs and exploits, and far more than it deserved based

on how limited the practice had been even in its heyday. If contemporary Mormons were

not law-breaking polygamists then surely their parents and grandparents had been.

Moreover, in turning polygamy into entertainment Americans trivialized one more aspect

of the Saints' faith. Polygamy was seldom treated as the complicated faith-based practice

it had been, but rather the historical figure of the polygamist was shoehorned into the

roles of stock villain or comic relief. Finally, while polygamy remained the primary focus

of non-Mormon assessments of family relations and the treatment of women among the

Mormons, American culture continued to explore the ways in which Mormonism—

polygamous or not—unfairly stifled and subordinated women in this life and the next.

Advertisement for Sydney Bell, The Wives of the Prophet (New York: Macaulay, 1935), New
York Times, October 27, 1935.
 129

Polygamy featured in the movies from the earliest days of silent film, and in 1917

audiences around the country thrilled to the "sensational photo drama" A Mormon Maid,

on which the young Cecil B. DeMille worked as Director General.34 Set on the frontier in

the mid-nineteenth century, the film centers on the Hogues, a happy Gentile family torn

apart when the unnamed Mormon Prophet—sporting a Brigham Young-style beard

clearly meant to bring that Prophet to viewers' minds—rewards the lustful demands of

his vicious right-hand man, who wants to take pretty Dora Hogue as his sixth wife.

Because the Prophet promises it will save his daughter from the horror of a polygamous

marriage, Dora's father proves his loyalty to the community by submitting to the

Prophet's demand that he take a second wife. According to one reviewer, the most

skillful and moving piece of acting in the film was the scene when Hogue returns to his

home to break the news of his second marriage to his first wife: "You see life and hope

drain from her face as the hideous truth forces its way to her understanding." Mad with

grief and shock, Hogue's wife finds "the answer to the hideous question that has beset

her" in a pistol hanging in her bedroom.35 With her husband frantically beating on the

locked door and the camera unflinchingly focused on her actions, Hogue's Gentile first

wife shoots herself in the head and falls dead on the floor. Throughout the action Hogue's

new second wife, chosen for him by the Prophet, sits quietly in the living room, staring

impassively into space. Whether they physically survived the torment or not, the fate of

polygamous wives was clearly nothing less than the death of self.

34
Robert Z. Leonard, dir. (USA: Paramount Pictures, 1917).The film was advertised in the New
York Times throughout the spring of 1917, and in the Chicago Daily Tribune that fall.
35
Mae Tinee, "Remarkable Bit of Acting by Edythe Chapman," review of A Mormon Maid,
Chicago Daily Tribune, September 12, 1917.
 Americans generally turned a blind eye to the fact that many of the Church's

ranking officials retained the multiple wives they had married in the nineteenth century,

as evidenced by periodic judicial decisions that men must provide for their plural wives

and their children. But occasionally the nation was scandalized by reported attempts to

enter into new plural marriages. Brigham H. Roberts, who the House of Representatives

refused to seat in 1900 because he had three living wives, made headlines in 1923 when

he supposedly applied for a new marriage license in Chicago. According to both the

Chicago Daily Tribune and The New York Times, Roberts still had two wives living, and
nn

high officials in the Church claimed no knowledge of his intention of marrying again.

Neither paper followed up on the story, leaving readers to wonder whether the reports

had been wrong, or the Church or the government had intervened to prevent the marriage,

or if the marriage took place after all. The American public did not need confirmation in

order to enjoy the scandal.

Senator Reed Smoot's marital status also continued to make the papers in the

decades after the United States Senate confirmed that he had never been a polygamist.

Apparently, Smoot himself made a joke of the popular conviction that he was secretly

keeping extra wives. According to at least two separate reports in The New York Times,

Smoot enjoyed telling a story about walking out of his Washington, DC, home one

morning in time to overhear a guide telling a group tourists that the bars on the first-floor
36
See "Support of Plural Wives: Utah Judge Says Mormons Should Be Compelled to Pay for
Them," New York Times, October 15, 1921; "Geddes Boy Eccles' Heir, Jury in Utah Case Holds," Chicago
Daily Tribune, July 17, 1915; "Utah Court Upholds a Plural Marriage: Decides That David Eccles Is the
Rich Sugar Man's Heir and Shares His Wealth," New York Times, July 17, 1915.
37
"B. H. Roberts to Wed Again: Mormon Elder Excluded by Congress Gets Chicago License,"
New York Times, November 10, 1923. "Mormon Leader Gets License Here: Mystifies Chicago Friends,"
Chicago Daily Tribune, November 10, 1923.
 131

windows of the house—which Smoot noted were there to protect the house from

burglary—were there to keep the Senator's wives in. In addition to sharing this joke—at

the expense of the foolish Gentile out-of-towners—with the Senator, the papers avoided

any hint of polygamy in this world or the next when Smoot announced that he planned to

remarry in 1930. In fact, both papers made a point of telling readers when Smoot's first

wife and the bride's first husband died, making it clear that both bride and groom were

single and had waited a respectable amount of time before getting engaged. And whereas

twenty-five years earlier such a wedding would likely have been subject to speculation

about celestial marriage—to whom would the bride be married in the afterlife? was

Smoot taking his second wife for eternity?—neither paper even hinted at such questions

when reporting the engagement or the wedding in the Salt Lake City temple.

This restraint stemmed in part no doubt from the pains the Church itself took to

prove to non-Mormon America that it no longer sanctioned nor even tolerated polygamy.

Both The New York Times and the Chicago Daily Tribune reported in 1921—the latter on

the front page—that the Church had expelled at least a dozen members for practicing

what they called "wife-sharing."40 Shortly thereafter, both excerpted the same portion of

Church President Heber J. Grant's condemnation of polygamy at the semi-annual

conference in Salt Lake City:

38
"Marshall Examines the Vice-Presidency," September 27, 1925; "Legge, Hamaguchi, and Some
Others: A Few Footnotes on Personalities Whose Names Have Figured in Headlines," July 7, 1929.
39
"Senator Reed Smoot Is Engaged to Marry Mrs. A. T. Sheets; to Wed in Mormon Temple,"
New York Times, July 1, 1930; "Senator Smoot to Wed the Widow of a Mormon Bishop," Chicago Daily
Tribune, July 1, 1930; "Reed Smoot to Wed Mrs. Sheets Today," New York Times, July 2, 1930; "Senator
Smoot and Bride Planning for Voyage to Honolulu," Chicago Daily Tribune, July 3, 1930.
40
"Mormon Church Expels Fifty Men and Women," Chicago Daily Tribune, March 17, 1921;
"Mormon Church Expels Wife Sacrifice Zealot: Eleven Others Excommunicated or Dropped from
Fellowship for Following His Lead," New York Times, March 18, 1921.
 132

We have excommunicated two patriarchs who have pretended to perform

plural marriages[...]. There is no man on earth that has the power to
perform plural marriages. There are no plural marriages. A so-called plural
marriage ceremony, if performed, is not a marriage at all, it is adultery
before God and under the law of the land.

Such strenuous and persistent punishment of members who either entered into or

performed new plural marriages finally began to convince the American public that the

Saints had truly abandoned the practice.

By the time of the first much-publicized raids of the Mormon fundamentalist

community at Short Creek, Arizona, in 1935 the media was firmly committed to

distinguishing between such polygamous "cults" and the Church of Jesus Christ of

Latter-day Saints. Coverage of the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of polygamists

after this raid often included an explanation to readers that the Church had abandoned

plural marriage in 1890 and excommunicated members found to be engaged in the

practice. The media was only too happy to acknowledge the Church's commitment to

stamping out polygamy.41 But no matter how often the papers explained the difference

between the Church and its polygamous offshoots, the outsized media coverage of such

geographically and numerically isolated incidents fostered the connection between

Mormons and polygamy in the minds of non-Mormon Americans.

No doubt the media paid such close attention to the marital exploits of the

fundamentalists because sex sells. And, despite the Saints' best efforts to disassociate

See for example "Alleges Polygamy in Arizona Colony: Prosecutor Accuses Eight Men in
Isolated Settlement—Most of Families on Relief," New York Times, August 4, 1935; "Polygamist in Utah
Gets 5-Year Term: Wife Is Also Sentenced for Part in Cult 'Marriage'," New York Times, December 5,
1943; "Mormon Church Expels Bigamist," New York Times, December 16, 1943; "Polygamists Sentenced:
Two Short Creek, Ariz., Men Get Terms in Penitentiary," New York Times, December 14, 1935; "Raids to
Stamp Out Polygamy Net 50 Arrests," Chicago Daily Tribune, March 8, 1944; "Mormon Bishop Says He
Tried to Fight Cult," Chicago Daily Tribune, September 30, 1944.
 133

themselves from the practice, Mormon polygamy remained popular entertainment, as

evidenced by The New York Times' recommendation of a novel of "the mental and

physical anguish of a young widow who is unsuspectingly drawn into marriage with a

Mormon and finds herself the second wife" as "Fiction for Holiday Makers."4 Just as the

anti-Mormon and anti-Catholic literature of the nineteenth century served as a vehicle for

graphic sexual content that decent Americans would not have dared to read in any other

context, in the early twentieth century American readers and filmgoers continued to look

to tales of Mormon polygamy for titillating thrills.

Some authors and publishers did little to disguise the purpose of their product.

One juicy example entitled The Sacred Fire, published in 1930, promised readers "the

story of sex in religion."

Once absolutely free in the exercise of his sexual desires, man was a
savage, but happy in his savagery. Then society began to circumscribe his
sex freedom. Unable to break the newly created social taboos, he sought
and found an escape from them in religion.

The advertisement even promises that the volume is "[bjeautifully illustrated with quaint

and rare prints." The Mormons were one example of this escape, alongside "erotic

worship," "physical torture," "flagellants," and "self-destructive sects."43

Novels similarly promised education and thrills "to all those interested in the

dramatic retelling of American history."44 Advertisements for The Wives of the Prophet

featured a drawing of a handsome Joseph Smith clutching a book (presumably the Book

42
Review of Salt Lake by Pierre Benoit, translated from the French by Florence and Victor Llona
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1921; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), May 28, 1922.
43
Advertisement for The Sacred Fire by B. Z. Goldberg (London: Jarrolds, 1935), New York
Times, November 23, 1930.
44
Sydney Bell, The Wives of the Prophet (New York: The Macaulay Company, 1935), 3.
 134

of Mormon) to his chest with his left hand while his right arm extends out and up in

benediction. As he gazes skyward, a small-waisted, pretty young woman kneels at his

feet, her back to the reader, with her hands folded in prayer or supplication and raised

toward Smith's face.45 A later advertisement included four more women at the Prophet's

feet, illustrating the "need of more women" that "moved" Smith to reveal the doctrine of

plural marriage.46 Despite of its pretensions to historical value, this "lusty piece of

Americana and an arousing story" was marketed alongside such titles as By the Sin That

Fell the Angels and Captive Goddess. But according to one review, the truth about Joseph

Smith suited the novel to both history and pulp fiction: "The story of Joseph Smith, the

prophet of Mormonism, is almost fool-proof [...]. The mere bald narrative of the

characters and events of the story of early Mormonism, taken wholly from Mormon

sources and unprejudiced observers, transcends the most fevered dreams of the

imagination." With Mormonism readers could have their historical value and their

erotica, too, because these episodes in American history have "other attractions" to

stimulate readers' interest.47

Not all depictions of Mormon polygamy belonged in the same category with

gothic romances. Many women authors in particular tried to address polygamy in a way

that enlightened readers about Mormon history, acknowledging the religious beliefs that

inspired so many people to enter plural marriages and at the same time exploring the

struggles that the men and women involved in such relationships faced. As early as 1933,

45
See New York Times, October 27, 1935.
46
See New York Times, October 28, 1935.
47
Fred T. Marsh, "Wives of the Prophet and Other Recent Works," New York Times, November 3,
1935.
reviewers praised The Proselyte by Susan Ertz for addressing polygamy in this way,

"neither minimizing the problems involved nor romancing beyond reason."48 But even

novelists who self-consciously sought to be even-handed exploited the most exciting—

and often the least flattering—episodes in Mormon history. In Ertz's case, her main

character comes to the United States from England as the young bride of a Mormon

missionary in the 1850s. The journey across the Atlantic, on a ship chartered by the

Saints' Perpetual Emigration Fund, is cramped, comfortless, and harsh—very unlike the

account of Mormon emigrant ships given in the nineteenth-century by Charles Dickens.

Adding to the melodrama Ertz's new Saints reach the American frontier during Brigham

Young's short-lived and disastrous handcart experiment, when converts crossed the

plains on foot. Although such tales continued to reinforce the connection of Mormons

and polygamy as the practice faded into the Church's past, such attempts to depict

Mormons as real people rather than simply as lusty leaders exploiting "revelations" to

gain access to ever more brides did improve on inherited stereotypes.

Once production codes imposed strict regulations on American film companies,

filmmakers could not treat polygamy—or sex of any kind—with the same abandon that

characterized early silent films. In some cases, Hollywood simply turned Mormon

polygamists into non-Mormons by removing wives from the plots when they adapted

popular books for the screen, as with numerous adaptations of Zane Grey's The Heritage

Fred T. Marsh, "A Novel of the Mormon Crusade," rev. of Susan Ertz, The Proselyte (New
York: D. Appleton Co., 1933), New York Times, October 1, 1933.
of the Desert and Wild Horse Mesa. In the epic film Brigham Young—Frontiersman

(1940) Young does have more than one wife, but that fact is just barely discernible in the

film. The most notable acknowledgement occurs when Young arrives at Fort Bridger and

a resident Gentile, upon hearing Young's name, perks up and says, "Say—how many...?"

Young interrupts and matter-of-factly responds, "Twelve." The exchange ends there.50

But while such an avoidance of polygamy in the Mormon story may have pleased the

Saints (Church leaders reportedly approved the script) and the censors, reviewers missed

what they recognized as "the most entertaining aspect of Mormonism, so far as the

popular mind is concerned.51 Without polygamy, the story of the Mormons lost its luster.

As a New York Times' reviewer declared, "It's too bad that 'Brigham Young—
e-y

Frontiersman' had to be so monog—we mean, monotonous."

By the beginning of World War II polygamy was no longer frightening. It was

tawdry spectacle. When treating a Mormon subject with respect, as mass media like

national newspapers and Hollywood films often did, non-Mormons often left it out of

their stories. While this may have been good policy for a nation that desperately wanted

to promote national unity at home and the image of it abroad. But despite the

acknowledged end of the practice decades before, non-Mormon American audiences still

looked for polygamy in stories of the Saints. Polygamy was not a clear and present
49
See for example Lesley Selander, dir., Heritage of the Desert (USA: Paramount Pictures, 1939),
in which the Mormon patriarch of the novel is made over as a simple God-fearing man by the simple
expedient of removing all wives or mention thereof from the story.
50
Henry Hathaway, dir., Brigham Young—Frontiersman (USA: 20th Century Fox, 1940). Fox
originally released the film under the title Brigham Young, only adding Frontiersman to make the title
character's identity clear to Eastern audiences.
51
Bosley Crowther, "The American Ideal: How Profound Is the Effect of Filmed History upon the
Popular Mind?" New York Times, September 29, 1940.
52
Bosley Crowther, "The Screen in Review," New York Times, Sept. 21, 1940.
danger, but frequent representations of the controversial practice they had given up

continued to connect the Mormons, in American minds, to their past sexual deviance.

Violence: "We are facing extermination! [...] We must fight and fight now!"5

At the beginning of this period, violence and polygamy remained intertwined in

the American mind much as they had been throughout the period from 1890 to 1917.

Non-Mormon Americans regarded violence against Gentiles as a major part of the Saints'

nineteenth-century history. A retrospective on American military actions undertaken by

The New York Times at the end of World War I reminded readers of the Mormons'

rebellious attitude toward the United States government by listing "Mormon

Disturbances" in 1838—giving the violent expulsion of the Mormons from Missouri an

aura of historical significance as well as legitimacy—and the Utah expedition of 1857-

58. The list also included the Mountain Meadows Massacre—hardly an obvious

candidate for a review of American wars and battles, given that the military was not

directly involved in the event. The Times gave only the American Indians a greater share

of space on their list of battles against the nation's enemies.54 Fifteen years later, another

writer for the Times reviewing presidential uses of federal troops included "the Mormon

Rebellion" without naming a year or location. Presumably he meant to refer to the Utah

expedition but, given the fact that readers had so many nineteenth-century Mormon

misbehaviors to choose from, the reference is unclear.55

53
Vardis Fisher, Children of God: An American Epic (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939), 187.
54
"Our Casualties in Other Wars: Before 1917 United States Engaged in 110 Wars and 8,600
Battles, Big and Little," New York Times, December 1,1918.
55
"Federal Soldiers Used by All the Presidents," New York Times, August 7, 1932.
 While the Chicago Daily Tribune reviewer focused, in her report on A Mormon

Maid, on the "old Mormon marriage beliefs," the movie actually presented violence

alongside polygamy as a key characteristic of Mormonism.56 The Avenging Angels—

"400 oath-bound fanatics, [who] hold the settlements in an iron ring"—fill Mormon

settlements, always armed and garbed in white robes and hoods that, according to the

film, inspired the dress later adopted by the Ku Klux Klan. This dreaded police force

does the bidding of the priesthood, and the priesthood's instructions often relate to

polygamy. The film shows the Angels guarding all of the ways into and out of the city,

shepherding wagon trains full of female converts—fresh wives—into the city, forcibly

escorting the Gentile Hogue to the temple to marry his second wife, and dragging

Hogue's unwilling daughter Dora to the home of her intended husband and his five other

wives. Hogue and his daughter escape the Mormons and their unnatural marriages only

after a dramatic chase and a final bloody showdown with these masked enforcers. The

Avenging Angels are so committed to the priesthood that they would rather die than let
en

escape two people whom the Prophet sought to control.

This image of Mormon violence against Gentiles dissipated somewhat in the

years immediately after World War I, however. In fact the Mormons impressed many

non-Mormon visitors to Utah with their friendly hospitality. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

whose first Sherlock Holmes novel presented "The Country of the Saints" much as it

appeared in A Mormon Maid nearly thirty years later, noted that the warm welcome he

received from the Mormons in Salt Lake City: "It was the more magnanimous because in
56
See Tinee, "Remarkable Bit of Acting," September 12, 1917.
57
Leonard, A Mormon Maid.
 139

my early days I had written in A Study in Scarlet a rather sensational and overcolored

picture of the Danite episodes which formed a passing stain in the early history of

Utah."58 Just as the contemporary Mormon rejection of plural marriage softened non-

Mormon attitudes toward the Saints' polygamous history, so, too, their hospitable

welcome convinced many Gentile travelers that their violent past had no bearing on their

present conduct.

During this period between World Wars, Gentile Americans not surprisingly

reinterpreted violence in the Mormons' past first and foremost by highlighting the Saints'

history of service to the nation. The Mormon Battalion, which Brigham Young sent to

join the United States military during the Mexican War, both as a gesture of goodwill to

the national government and as a means of earning the community some much-needed

money, became a favorite feature in stories of the frontier. Reed Smoot provided the

foreword to a 1928 book dedicated entirely to "this curious episode in the settling of the

American West."59 Writers routinely covered the battalion's march in pioneer histories,

including the volume in the Works Progress Administration's American Folkways Series

dedicated to the American Southwest.60 And the battalion was the subject of two Western

monuments recommended to tourists by the national media: one near the battalion's trail

west at Santa Fe, New Mexico, and another in Salt Lake City.61 Although the formation

of the battalion was often presented as a favor by the military to the Mormons and not the

58
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Our Second American Adventure Q3oston, MA: Little, Brown, &
Company, 1924), 87.
59
"Brief Reviews," rev. of The March of the Mormon Battalion by Frank Alfred Golder, (New
York: New Century Books, 1928), New York Times, December 2, 1928.
60
Haniel Long, Pinon Country (New York: Dwell, Sloan & Pierce, 1941).
61
See "Santa Fe Monument," New York Times, June 23, 1940, and "Salt Lake City Memorial,"
photograph, Chicago Daily Tribune, October 9, 1938.
 140

other way around, Gentiles celebrated the Saints' willingness to serve and their role in

opening up the southern route to California.

The eagerness among non-Mormon Americans to celebrate the Mormon pioneer

spirit led some to reappraise even the Mountain Meadows massacre. The New York Times

revisited the event in 1926, when a member of the House of Representatives introduced a

bill calling for a fresh investigation. The article recounted a fairly standard version of

events clearly based on John D. Lee's memoir: the Mormons, in an uproar because

Buchanan had "deposed" Brigham Young, attacked the Gentile wagon train largely

because it originated in Arkansas, where Apostle Parley Pratt had been murdered. The

story departed from the standard narrative of previous decades, however, in that it

refrained from accusing Brigham Young of ordering the massacre. Naming Lee's

accomplices in southern Utah, the article more accurately blamed Young and the Church

hierarchy for protecting the perpetrators after the fact and nothing more.

This reappraisal continued in 1929 with the publication of an edited volume of the

correspondence of an officer in the United States troops that Buchanan sent to Utah in

1857. A review of the book begins by informing readers that Buchanan "dispatched an

army to Utah ostensibly to protect his newly appointed Governor and Federal judges and

to suppress Mormon 'rebellion,' but actually to divert public attention from the slavery

question and the impending Civil War." In short, "Buchanan's blunder" was much ado

about nothing. The Mormons were not in a state of rebellion, and the army's action only

resulted in a huge waste of money and a "deep resentment" among the Mormons "which

62
W. J. Ghent, "Utah Massacre Is Raked Over: Congress, after 68 Years, Is Asked to Fix
Responsibility for Cruel Day at Mountain Meadows," February 7, 1926.
 141

contributed not a little to the horrible massacre at Mountain Meadows."63 Here, the guilt

no longer belongs solely to Brigham Young and his loyal fanatics. Rather, the national

government that unfairly attacked them in order to distract the Gentile populace from

more pressing issues received its portion of the blame.

Some Americans, now removed from the 1857 massacre by more than half a

century and remembering the nation's recent traumatic experience of the carnage of

World War I, reappraised the Mountain Meadows massacre during the interwar years. A

1931 review went so far as to actually absolve the Prophet of blame for the massacre.

Further, while the writer blamed the Mormons for protecting the murderers in their midst,

he offered some explanation: "One may see in this the insane fanaticism bred by long

years of bitter persecution." While rightly unwilling to justify the event, some Americans

acknowledged that years of abuse from outsiders could have warped the Mormon sense

of solidarity until they were willing to protect even their guiltiest members from Gentile

accusations. But this explanation did not fully satisfy—not because the Mormons must

have been guilty, but because "so hard is [the massacre] to reconcile with the many

humane policies of the Mormons [...] and with the peacefulness, hospitality and

kindliness often apparent among them." 4 The Saints that Americans had come to know

in the years after World War I were just too nice a group of people to have committed

such an atrocity.

"Notes on Rare Books," rev. of Utah Expedition of 1857-1858; Letters of Captain Jesse A.
Gove, 10th Infantry, U. S. A., of Concord, N H, to Mrs. Gove, and Special Correspondence of The'New
York Herald, ed. Otis G. Hammond, New York Times, June 2, 1929.
64
"Westward with the Mormons: Two Books That Trace the Rise and Spread of Their Inland
Empire," New York Times, December 20, 1931.
 142

But whether non-Mormon Americans could comprehend how the Saints could

have done such a deed or not, many were still entertained by it. Like sex, violence sells,

and despite some historians' reassessments of the Mountain Meadows massacre many

authors returned to sensational stories of blood atonement in Mormon country.

Amazingly reviewers labeled such work novel, claiming, despite Zane Grey's

phenomenally popular novels and the numerous film adaptations of them, that nineteenth

century Utah was "a seldom exploited scene of American history."65 Merritt Parmelee

Allen's Out of a Clear Sky covered this ground through the eyes of an eighteen-year-old

boy—and, uniquely up to this point, for a young adult audience. Citing Hubert Howe

Bancroft's sympathetic 1889 history of the Mormons in Utah, Allen informed readers in a

short preface that Brigham Young not only did not order the attack, but in fact tried to

prevent it. The massacre, he wrote, was the work of a few individuals aroused to violence

by the emigrants' boasts of having murdered Mormon Apostle Parley Pratt in Arkansas.

Thus Allen is one of a very few writers up to this point who acknowledged that the

victims at Mountain Meadows had in any way contributed to the hostile environment in

which the massacre occurred. But his attention to historical facts ended with the preface:

he goes on to present a thrilling tale of best friends Bill and Stormy who travel with the

ill-fated emigrant train, barely escape Mountain Meadows with their lives, and eventually

discover a map that will lead them to a gold mine sure to make them rich. Offering a tale

"The Mormon Frontier," rev. of The Fighting Danites by Dane Coolidge (New York: E. P.
Dutton & Co., 1934), New York Times, March 18, 1934.
 143

full of fast horses, gunfights, and terrifying Saints, Allen thrilled his young audience

while cementing the association between Mormonism and violence in their minds.66

Histories offered similarly lurid entertainment. Zealots of Zion, by Charles KelK

and Hoffman T. Birney, an occasional book reviewer for The New York Times, promised

readers the inspiring story of the Mormon settlement of Utah. The narrative brims over

with enthusiastic admiration for this "saga of the soil," and yet Birney's does not describe

the Mormons themselves—the zealots of the title—in inspiring terms. Their story is "the

epic of a people without humor [...] whose dauntless perseverance was the stubborn folly

of a Casabianca, whose religion was as grimly austere as that of any medieval ascetic

brotherhood." This "peasantry" was "humble, uneducated, almost illiterate"—and

unquestioningly loyal to their leaders.67 And these plodding peasants, under the sway of

their local priesthood, committed the atrocity of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Though Birney assured readers that "there is little pleasure in the exhumation of dead

bones, in the renewal of opportunities for gossip on old scandals," he went on to dedicate

four illustrated chapters—nearly one hundred of the book's three hundred pages—to the

event. He acknowledged that the Mormons of southern Utah believed that the emigrants

harassed and menaced the communities along their route, acquitted Brigham Young of

involvement, and concluded that the entirety of Mormonism cannot and should not be

judged by the deeds of the fanatical few. Nevertheless, by dedicating nearly a third of his

history of the settlement of Utah to this isolated incident, Birney gave the event outsized

66
New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1938.
67
Zealots of Zion (Philadelphia, PA: The Penn Publishing Company, 1931), 16-17.
68
Birney, 134.
 144

importance in readers' minds. Further, his grisly tale of bloodthirsty zealots who

murdered out of devotion to their religion reinforced a direct connection between

Mormon religion and violence.

Three years later, in 1934, Birney co-authored Holy Murder: The Story of Porter

Rockwell, which continued the thrills of Zealots of Zion but without the apparent

fondness for the Mormon peasantry. Rockwell had long been rumored to be the Prophets'

chief enforcer in the nineteenth century, first under Joseph Smith in Missouri and Illinois

and then for Brigham Young in Utah. Birney and Kelly lingered not only on Rockwell's

dedication to the doctrine of blood atonement, which taught that some sins are so

grievous that the sinner can only atone by his or her death and which many non-Mormons

believed had been used by the Mormons to justify wholesale murder in the nineteenth

century. They also alleged a general devotion to the blood atonement among the general

Mormon populace. In one episode, they quoted from the diary of a Gentile stopping over

in the Utah territory during the Reformation of the mid-1850s. He described a grisly

example of the vengeance supposedly hallowed by all Mormons:

When we reached the end door of the schoolhouse we saw a group of men
and women circled about the front of the teacher's stand, singing, praying,
and repeating from their bible [sic].... We saw within the circle, stripped
to the waist and laid out on benches, the dead bodies of two fine-looking
middle-aged men, one with eleven buckshot through the breast and the
other with a bullet wound apparently through the heart. They had been
Mormons, had apostatized and attempted to escape to the American army.
They had been blood-atoned.... Such incidents were frequent in those

Charles Kelly and Hoffman Birney, Holy Murder: The Story of Porter Rockwell (New York:
Minton, Balch, 1934), 151. Ellipses in original.
 145

They follow immediately with the story of Mountain Meadows, and, although Brigham

Young is still in this telling ignorant of the event itself until after the fact, the massacre is

the combined work of religious fanatics riled to a frenzy by their Prophet's violent

preachings and the machinations of his Danites. The book finally ends not with Porter

Rockwell but with Heber J. Grant, the contemporary prophet, whom the authors identify

as the son of an infamous blood-atoner, a defiant polygamist who married two of his four

wives after the passage of federal legislation forbidding the practice, and "a religious

potentate with tremendous secular power."70 Though they did not claim that Grant

wielded the violent forces by which his predecessors' maintained control over the entire

populace of the intermountain West, they did assert that Grant benefited from the work of

men like Porter Rockwell who earlier conditioned the people of Utah—Mormon and

Gentile alike—to respect and obey the authority of the Prophet in all things. The authors

made clear that the Prophet benefited in their own day from his inheritance of the fruits of

frontier violence, and that, even in the absence of modern-day Danites, twentieth-century

Mormon society was controlled in part by the memory of men like Rockwell.

While Kelly and Birney offer little sympathy to their subjects, their book's New

York Times reviewer does note that the "persecution complex" that justified such violence

in the minds of many Mormons was the result of decades of suffering at the hands of

Gentile Americans.71 Non-Mormon Americans were not the only observers to note this

connection: in 1935, both The New York Times and the Chicago Daily Tribune reported

70
Kelly and Birney, 296-97. Quote on 296.
71
Fred T. Marsh, "Porter Rockwell, Chieftain of the 'Destroying Angels': The Story of a
Celebrated Leader in the Days of Mormon Struggles to Found an Empire," New York Times, April 29,
1934.
 146

that German chancellor Adolf Hitler's own paper had justified the Nazis intolerance

toward Jews by calling to mind Americans' expulsion of the Mormons from Missouri and

Illinois. According to Hitler's paper, the nineteenth-century Mormon problem was an

10

"American parallel to the Jewish problem in Germany." In the years following this

trenchant and embarrassing observation, stories of Mormon violence—which inevitably

led to uncomfortable reminders of Gentile persecution—virtually disappeared. Frequent

stories of Nauvoo in the Chicago Daily Tribune stopped describing the Mormons'

reasons for leaving, focusing instead of the romantic history of the pioneer trek that

began in Illinois.

The only authors who remained committed to remembering the violence

perpetrated against the Mormons were former Mormons themselves. Vardis Fisher, a

critically acclaimed novelist and the director of the Idaho Federal Writers Project, turned

his eyes in the late 1930s to the story of his religious ancestors. Children of God: An

American Epic, won the 1939-1940 Harper Novel Prize in spite of unenthusiastic

reviews. Some non-Mormon critics accused Fisher of taking Joseph Smith too

seriously, and of acquitting the Mormons of their fair share of the guilt in the expulsions

from Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois.74 And Fisher's interpretation of the persecution of the

Saints is unalloyed: Joseph Smith "wanted a life of peace and study and reflection."75 He

neither founded nor approved of the Danites, but understood that such movements among
72
"Germany Shifting Her Foreign Policy: U. S. and Great Britain Now Objects of Attack—
Colonies Drive Seen As One Reason," New York Times, November 21, 1938; "Germans Track Down Jews
in Raids on Aliens: Police Search Homes for Aliens," Chicago Daily Tribune, November 21, 1938.
73
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939. On the Harper Prize, see "Books and Authors," New York
Times,iu\y\6, 1939.
7
Ralph Thompson, "Books of the Times," rev., New York Times, August 24, 1939.
75
Fisher, 183.
 147

the Saints were the result of the "hell of persecution and death" visited on them by their

Gentile neighbors.76 This spirit of self-defense persists after Smith's death, as the Saints

move west under Brigham Young and founded their kingdom in the desert. In Fisher's

telling, the Mormons are not ultimately responsible for their own resort to violence:

"[Smith] had expected persecution; but he had not expected under the flag and the

Constitution of the United States to be tried on false charges, or threatened with violence

and death."77 Fisher did not deny that the Saints were violent. But he placed the blame for

their violence entirely—and inaccurately—on the shoulders of the Gentile Americans

who viciously expelled the Saints from state after state, and the government forces that

sometimes joined anti-Mormon mobs and never intervened to protect Mormon citizens

from the violent intolerance of their neighbors.

Images of Mormon violence persisted throughout the interwar years in fits and

starts. Non-Mormon authors were more likely to employ them than Mormon or former

Mormon authors, and popular writers used them with far greater frequency than scholarly

writers. But the most important factor in the prevalence of images of Mormon violence

was the state of international affairs. When Americans were at war or nearly so, and

needed to unite the entire populace to fight for the nation, images of Mormon violence

slipped out of public view. When there was no national fight at hand, as in the 1920s and

early 1930s when World War I was a fading memory and World War II not yet an

imminent reality, Americans entertained themselves with chilling tales of nineteenth-

century Mormons' supposedly widespread thirst for violence.

76
Fisher, 187.
77
Fisher, 70.
 148

Theocracy: "a benevolent despotism"78

Many non-Mormon Americans admired the Saints for the industry they displayed

in the settlement of the intermountain wastes of Utah, the thrift and the foresight that

prompted them to stockpile food against future want, and the American spirit that led

them to empty their grainhouses to supply the U.S. military during World War I. The

Saints' patriotic fervor during World War I and their publicly celebrated welfare program

in the Great Depression reinforced positive images of the Saints. But the highly

cooperative nature of Latter-day Saint society that many recognized as the cornerstone of

Mormon success continued to rankle non-Mormon Americans. The Mormon community

continued to vote largely as a group for the same political candidates and to maintain

clear boundaries between themselves and their Gentile countrymen, and the Church

continued to invest in successful business ventures that affected employment, products,

and services throughout the intermountain West. Non-Mormon Americans remained on

their guard against the tight-knit Mormon community and the religious leaders who

seemed to so strongly influence their followers' behaviors in every aspect of their lives.

The nation turned its attentions to unity at home as it fought in World War I, but

when the war ended the Mormon penchant for near-total unity in political matters quickly

reentered the national conversation. In the debate over the League of Nations, which

Church President Heber J. Grant supported, the national news media had no doubt where

the Mormons stood: "what the President of their Church thinks on public matters has

Wallace Stegner, Mormon Country, American Folkways, Erskine Caldwell, ed. (New York:
Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942), 99.
 149

always had more weight with them than the opinion of a political office holder."79 The

papers seemed almost sympathetic to Senator Reed Smoot's plight; he opposed the

League of Nations, but as a duly elected United States Senator from Utah he could not

possibly hope to convince the majority of his Mormon constituents to side with him

against their Prophet. Senator Smoot might think independently of the Prophet, but the

media took it for granted that the vast majority of other Mormons did not.

This belief in Mormon political unity notwithstanding, the tone of the press had

decidedly improved in the nearly fifteen years since the Senate refused to oust Reed

Smoot from his seat. The original furor over Smoot's election disappeared from the

papers, except when a colleague in the Senate claimed that Smoot was out to get him

because he had voted to have Smoot removed in 1907.80 In fact, Smoot himself faced a

tough reelection campaign in 1920, with even the Democratic-leaning New York Times

noting that the Republican Mormon Senator was facing a serious challenge because in
01

1916 his largely Republican Church "decided to keep hands off' of politics in Utah.

When the paper cried foul about the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City being used for a

political event, it chastised the Church—without a hint of irony—on the grounds that "the

Mormon Church does not take part in politics as a church."82 When Smoot finally lost his

Senate seat in the Democratic tidal wave that accompanied the election of President

"Japanese Settler Problem Paramount in California," New York Times, January 25, 1920.
80
"Smoot's Charges Lies Is Creel's Rejoinder: Asserts Senator Is Seeking Revenge for His Share
in Mormon Exposure," New York Times, April 12, 1920.
81
"Republicans Fear Loss of the Senate," New York Times, August 23, 1920.
82
"Cox in Tabernacle Arouses Morm[o]ns by League Speech," New York Times, September 16,
1920.
 150

Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, observers classed the Mormons with the rest of American

voters who simply wanted change.83

But while Americans seemed willing to accept the idea that the Church did not

officially involve itself in politics, they routinely reminded each other that in the not-so-

distant past Mormon leaders had wielded virtually unlimited power over their followers'

lives. As one reviewer said of John T. Faris's nostalgic history The Romance of Forgotten

Towns, the Mormon city of Nauvoo had been "fraught with sinister possibilities," as

Smith and his fellow Church leaders sought and nearly achieved a "politically sundered

State within the United States."84 Whatever the Mormons might be in the early twentieth

century, it was not to be forgotten that less than a century earlier their leaders had been

empire-building.

This understanding of early Mormon behavior as politically motivated extended

not only to the obvious topics of the formation and regulation of Nauvoo and the State of

Deseret, but also to unique Mormon religious doctrines such as plural marriage. No less a

respected intellectual than George Bernard Shaw informed his listeners in a 1933 speech

in New York on America's new role as a world leader that Joseph Smith had been a

community-building genius. Smith introduced polygamy, Shaw argued, because he knew

his small community needed a rapid increase of political power that could be obtained

only by increasing the size of the Church. This assessment amused the audience, but

83
N. L. Wilson, "Crisis and Church Defeated Smoot," New York Times, November 20,1932. Just
like everybody else, the Mormons wanted change.
84
"Buried Towns of America: Where Realities Did Not Equal the Dreams and Plans of Old
Settlers," rev. The Romance of Forgotten Towns by John T. Faris, New York Times, October 5, 1924.
 151

Shaw rebuked them for laughing. He apparently could not see the humor in his claim that

Joseph Smith designed polygamy for the purpose of breeding more Mormon voters.85

Such reminders of past political unity among the Latter-day Saints—in all of its

real and supposed forms—gained little traction, however, in the face of present-day

realities. As the nation struggled through the Great Depression, Utah remained solidly

behind President Roosevelt and the Democratic Party throughout the 1930s and into the

1940s. Mormon voters dealt a solid blow to lingering images of their lockstep unity with

Church leaders when in 1933 Utah became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the

constitutional amendment ending Prohibition. Against their theological principles and

their leaders' counsels, the bone-dry Mormons supported the national re-legalization of

the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Just three years later, the Saints once again ignored

their leaders' endorsements at the polls, voting to return F.D.R. to the White House by a

handy margin. A majority of Utah voters did not again pick a presidential candidate

from the Republican Party—the party sometimes openly and sometimes tacitly supported

by Church leadership—until 1952.

But while non-Mormon Americans were fairly well convinced that individual

Mormons were no longer in lockstep with their leaders in the voting booth, they were

keenly attentive—both for good and for ill—to the Church's apparent domination of the

economic lives of their members and of the entire intermountain West. Non-Mormons

85
"Shaw Tells America It Must Lead to Save Civilization," New York Times, April 12, 1933, and
"Text of George Bernard Shaw's Address Before Throng of 3,500 at Metropolitan Opera House," New
York Times, April 14, 1933.
86
"3 State Vote Wet: Utah Is the 36th, Insuring End of the Dry Law," New York Times, November
8, 1933, and "Prohibition Is Voted Out: Ohio, Perm, Utah End It," Chicago Daily Tribune, November 8,
1933.
87
"Roosevelt Sweeps the Middle West," New York Times, November 4, 1936.
 152

took umbrage at the Church's strict policies on tithing for members and their strong

encouragement of all Mormons to patronize Church-owned businesses. They also

criticized the control that the Church's economic power in the region might give them

over non-Mormons' lives. To many Americans, no church had any business being in

business, much less controlling the purse strings of members and their non-affiliated

neighbors.

During World War I the nation as a whole benefited from the Mormon Church's

practice of collecting a ten percent tithe from all members when the Church donated

some of the most tangible proceeds of those tithes to the war effort. But immediately after

the war's end, attacks on the Church's cooperative economic practices began anew. As

Americans rushed to defend capitalism in the face of the recent communist revolution in

Russia, one writer noted that such collective practices were simply not a part of the

American character. The one success at such experiments in American history, he noted,

was the Mormons. And this, simply put, "hints that the Mormons have some quality

lacking in the rest of us, and it more than hints that the quality in question either is one

not particularly desirable from the American standpoint or else goes with other qualities

that are not at all desirable."88

Writers also would not let the nation forget what one book reviewer called the

Mormon laity's "alien and inimical solidarity." This solidarity, many argued, was

merely designed to enrich the leaders of the Church. One writer argued in the 1920s that

88
"Topics of the Times: Americans Are Not Co-operators," editorial, New York Times, October
15, 1919.
89
Charles Willis Thompson, "Brigham Young Was the Yankee Moses: He Led the Banished
Mormons through the Wilderness," rev. of M. R. Werner, Brigham Young (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
Co., 1925), New York Times, June 14, 1925.
 153

the Church was a great industry built on the backs of members tithes, which he estimated,

without access to the Church's financial records, at $4 million a year. He was particularly

disturbed that Church leaders then disbursed members' tithes without providing any

accounting of expenditures to members, leaving individuals Mormons in the dark about

what the institution did with their money.90 When businesses in which Church leaders

held prominent positions were accused of improper practices, the Church was always

implicated in the alleged "profiteering." For example, while the government named the

entire Board of Directors in its action against the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company in 1920,

newspaper headlines played up not just the involvement of individual Church leaders on

the Board, but specifically the "Mormon Church Head" in one case and simply

"Mormons" in another.91 When one Mormon—especially a high-ranking one—engaged

the general response was to view it as a pattern typical of Mormons in general. A New

York Times reviewer's summary of popular historian Bernard DeVoto's view is

representative of the general attitude toward the Mormon Church's involvement in

business: "he rather suspects an institution in which 'piety and business could be

completely fused.'"92

John Carter, "In Mormonism Economics Was Married to Religion," rev. of James H. Snowden,
The Truth about Mormonism (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1926), New York Times, September
26, 1926. Carter argued that Snowden's book, which focused on what the author viewed as the fraudulent
nature of Mormon scripture and doctrine, missed the point entirely. The problem with Mormonism, he
claimed, was the leaders' economic power over Church members and indeed the entire intermountain West.
91
See, for example, "Mormon Church Head Accused as Sugar Profiteer," Chicago Daily Tribune,
June 22, 1920, and "Say Mormons Profiteered: Company Including High Church Officials Accused," New
York Times, July 20, 1920. While the former article only names Church President Heber J. Grant, the latter
also pointed out that the Church's Presiding Bishop was involved.
92
"Current Magazines," rev. of Bernard DeVoto, "The Mormon Centennial," American Mercury
(January 1930), New York Times, January 12, 1930.
 154

Any circumstances that made national unity a paramount concern drove ugly

suspicions about the Saints out of the spotlight. During the 1930s, as the nation suffered

through the worst economic depression in American history, Mormon business savvy

came to be viewed as a valuable national commodity. When Roosevelt appointed

Marriner S. Eccles as the head of the Federal Reserve in 1935, his Mormon heritage was

not a liability; rather, it added "picturesque touches" to his biography.93 The "Mormon

precepts of industry" that informed his development as a man and a businessman proved

Eccles a true capitalist. Further, Mormon economic practices, which one writer labeled

"socially controlled capitalism," were expected to be essential to Eccles in using wise

regulatory measures to guide the nation through the financial crisis.94

As Eccles used his Mormon business sense to bring the national economy back

from the brink, the Church announced an initiative seemingly designed not only to help

the Saints but also to improve their national image. Church authorities declared in 1936

that they were organizing a community program to get every Mormon off of the national

dole. That effort would supply the wants of Mormons who could not find work, and put

them back to work earning their support. Church farms, worked by volunteers and the

unemployed, contributed foodstuffs; Church factories, also using the labor of

unemployed members, produced clothing and other basic necessities; and individual

93
"The 'Appointee Apparent,'" New York Times, September 19, 1935. Interestingly, reports of
Eccles' Mormon background did not include a review of the very public civil lawsuit brought by his
father's second wife—who the elder Eccles married well after the 1890 Manifesto—on behalf of her son.
The court awarded the woman's son a portion of the Eccles estate. See "Asserts Eccles Claimed Woman As
Plural Wife," Chicago Daily Tribune, July 3, 1915, and "Geddes Boy Eccles' Heir, Jury in Utah Case
Holds," Chicago Daily Tribune, July 17, 1915.
94
"The Storm Center of the Banking Bill: Governor Eccles of the Federal Reserve Is a Westerner
Who Believes in Man-Made Laws to Meet Economic Crises," New York Times, May 5, 1935.
 155

Mormon volunteers staffed distribution centers. By the end of 1936, Church President

Grant proudly declared that the drive had succeeded, and the national media celebrated

the Mormons' accomplishment.96 The Saints were finally forced to admit that their

efforts had failed, but the media continued to focus on the fact that the community united

to take care of its own. 7

In spite of the newfound respect for Mormon industry and mutual support,

Americans remained squeamish over the means by which the Saints achieved what

looked to outsiders like community-wide economic security. While the Chicago Daily

Tribune clearly intended to reassure readers that the Mormons were as American as apple

pie, economically speaking, in a piece published in 1934, the writer's wariness over the

Church President's power was unmistakable. Noting "the unity, the oneness of purpose"

evident at the Church's annual conferences, he declared that Mormonism was "not so

much a state church as a church-controled [sic] state." Heber J. Grant, as leader of the

Church and nominal head of a number of mining, banking, and industrial interests

throughout the West, wielded "the power of an absolute dictator over a vast

commonwealth." While the Church had amassed incredible economic power, the writer

noted, it "ha[d] used this power with such wise moderation" that it is no longer something

95
"Mormons Will End Dole," New York Times, May 1, 1936; "Mormons Fast Day a Month to Aid
the Jobless," Chicago Daily Tribune, June 30, 1936; "Mormons Will Have 80,000 Off Dole by Oct. 1,
Leaders Say," Chicago Daily Tribune, September 11, 1936; "Mormons Soon to Open Storehouses for
Needy," New York Times, October 29, 1936; "Mormons to Open Storehouses to Needy on Sunday,"
Chicago Daily Tribune, October 29, 1936; "Mormon Church Takes Care of Its Own Needy: Few Get on
Relief Rolls of Government," Chicago Daily Tribune, December 13, 1936.
96
"Mormon Work Drive Takes All Off Relief," New York Times, October 3, 1936; "Mormon
Drive to Get Off Dole Called Success: Church Leader Tells How Plan Worked," Chicago Daily Tribune,
October 3, 1936.
97
"Effort of Mormons to Avoid Relief Rolls Frustrated by Lure of Government Funds," New
York Times, June 6, 1938.
 156

to be feared. But the writer himself hardly seemed comfortable with these assurances,

especially given the fact that he followed this backhanded praise of the present Prophet

with a standard overview of the abuses and excesses of "dictator and king" Joseph Smith
OS

and the "empire building" exploits of his successor Brigham Young. Despite Grant's

benevolent uses of his seemingly unlimited power over Mormons and the Western

economy, neither the writer nor his readers could forget that the Mormon prophet had

access to such control.

Americans' greatest concern about the Saints' theocratic tendencies during the

interwar years was the social control that the Church exerted in the lives of individual

members. But responses to the Church's perceived domination of members' social lives

were mixed, as the nation transitioned from the ebullient postwar period to the strain of

dealing with a Depression at home and a looming war abroad. As Americans celebrated

national security and prosperity in the 1920s, the Mormons were cast as a bunch of hicks

estranged from the rest of American culture in their intermountain stronghold. But as

tough times called for national unity—a unity that the Mormons exemplified—their

sacrifice of some individual self-determination in favor of community cohesion began to

look appealing, rather than repulsive.

A review of the 1926 sociological study, A Social Survey ofEscalante, Utah,

demonstrated Americans' disdain for the Mormons early in this period. A New York

Times editorialist mocked the small Utah ranching village surveyed in the book under

review where, he quoted, "it is very easy to make a living." This ease, he seemed to feel,

Joseph U. Dugan, "Zeal, Unity, Heber Grant Exalt Mormon Empire," May 20, 1934.
cast a shadow on the character of the people in this small Mormon community. The men

who populated such a place, where they "loaf, doze, and chatter" their way through the

winter months, clearly had an aversion to work. And in fact, this ease only benefited the

men, who kept their wives at home "drudging away all Winter" without any modern

conveniences like washing machines and electric irons to aid them in their housework.

(Focused on criticizing these small town Mormons, the writer did not indicate, for the

sake of comparison, whether the average Gentile American living in a similar rural

village had or could afford such conveniences.) These men not only denied their wives

the assistance of electric appliances but also forced them to deliver unreasonable numbers

of children without the aid of a physician. The author finally delighted in the "skewness"

of these primitive villagers, who eschewed the trappings of modern life and admitted no

entertainment other than their religion.99 Little wonder that the Church felt the need to

educate the non-Mormon public that the Saints were not "ignorant people" and "opposed

to education."100

While national prohibition forbade the manufacture, transportation, or sale of

"intoxicating liquors" from 1920 until 1933, the national press took the Mormons to task

for their unnecessarily restrictive attitudes when Utah began enforcing bans on public

smoking. According to one editorial, the Mormons were simply opposed to fun: "the

most infamous thing about smoking is that its victims enjoy it. Therefore, away with it!"

The writer went on to warn that if the Mormons were allowed to prohibit smoking, they

99
"A Mormon Village," rev. of Lowry Nelson, A Social Survey ofEscalante, Utah (Provo, UT:
Brigham Young University, 1926), New York Times, January 31, 1926.
100
"Mormon Campaign Here: Expect to Dissipate Misunderstandings in Eastern States," New
York Times, April 1, 1923.
would undoubtedly ban tea, coffee, chocolate, and cocoa as well. The New York Times

applauded the formation of a "New Party of Freedom" to fight the ban, which it said

made "victims" of respectable men. But while a ban on smoking could be interpreted

as directed at Gentiles, because Mormons generally adhered to a doctrinal prohibition of

tobacco, Mormon restrictions on the use among members of various substances including

coffee and tea also drew scorn. In essence, newspapers treated restrictions on the use of

anything widely used among non-Mormons as prudish.

Americans could not, in the midst of the self-indulgence that characterized the

national culture during the 1920s, forgive the Mormons for their seemingly old-fashioned

and unnecessarily fastidious habits, and their aversion to modern modes of dress also

drew fire. As before World War I, when President Grant admonished conference-goers

against "immodest" women's fashions such as short skirts, The New York Times made

sure the nation knew about it.104 If a man sported an old-fashioned full beard, he was

mocked for looking like "a circuit rider or a Mormon elder."105 And the sacred

undergarments worn by all Mormons after their temple endowment ceremony, which

had seemed terribly sinister when they were described during the Smoot hearings, were

laughable after World War I. But in addition to being funny, the garments were a clear

"Utah Lawbreakers," editorial, New York Times, February 23, 1923.

102
"Salt Lake Fights Anti-Cigarette Law," New York Times, March 4, 1923.
103
"Tea and Coffee Banned: Mormon Conference Also Condemns Use of Tobacco by Elders,"
New York Times, April 25, 1925; "Mormons Move to Check Smoking and Drinking," New York Times,
April 8, 1939.
104
"Mormon Scores Fashions: President of Sect Warns against Modern Dress and Tea Parties,"
New York Times, April 6, 1926. Grant invited Gentile mockery on two counts at this conference: he
condemned "afternoon teas" as well as the latest fashions.
105
Harold Phelps Stokes, "A Portrait of the New Chief Justice," New York Times, February 16,
1930. The Mormon penchant for growing beards to celebrate Pioneer Day each July also routinely made
the news. See, for example, "All Mormon Men Growing Beards to Honor Brigham Young and His
Pioneers," New York Times, July 22, 1934.
 159

sign of the leaders' control over individual members. When a man was removed from the

Tabernacle in Salt Lake City in 1927 for disrupting a Church conference meeting by

loudly protesting proposed changes to the temple garments, The New York Times not only

mocked the Mormons for their silly underwear, but also criticized the leaders' repressive

measures in having a protester jailed to keep him from disrupting the conference.

Such wanton restrictiveness on the part of the leaders combined with a supposed

distaste for learning docile obedience on the part of their followers appeared to result in

the absence of intellectual freedom among the Mormons. When Reed Smoot, already

unpopular in the aftermath of the stock market crash in 1929 because of his position as

the Republican head of the Senate Finance Committee, attempted to persuade the Senate

to renew a ban on the importation of "obscene and indecent literature," a number of

Senators strenuously objected to his promotion of "the worst kind of censorship."

Accusing Smoot of trying "to bar out human thought" from America, critics suggested

that he wanted to reduce Uncle Sam "to an innocent in pinafores." To prove the folly of

Smoot's concern for arresting an influx of "salacious, seditious" material into the

country, a group called the People's Legislative Service issued a statement quoting a

number of passages from The Journal and Discourses of Brigham Young in which Young

discussed polygamy and denounced the United States government. If such ideas are good

See "Court Warns Mormon in Undergarment Case: Sentence Is Suspended When He Agrees to
Stop Fight on Church's 'Shorts'," October 12, 1927, and "Salt Lake Rivals London," October 19, 1927.
Mormon temple garments also featured in a review of gifts sent to President Grover Cleveland while he
was in the White House, in which the writer's short list included "a suit of undergarments such as are worn
by High Priests of the Mormon Church" ("White House Gifts," New York Times, February 17, 1929).
 160

enough for the Mormon prophet, Smoot's critics asserted, then they are good enough for

the rest of the American people.

But just as non-Mormons were willing to believe that the Church's economic

control over members was largely benign in modern America, they also believed that the

Church's social influence, while excessive, did not encourage dangerous behavior. In

direct contradiction of fears only a generation earlier that Mormon theology bred

criminals, when a young Mormon woman on trial for kidnapping claimed that she had

been forced to commit the crime because her husband ordered her to do it and "[s]he was

brought up in the Mormon Church, where a man's word is law," the prosecutor scoffed.

The jury agreed that the young woman was fully her own mistress during the commission
10R • •

of the crime and convicted her. While Mormons might unreasonably obey their

Church—and Mormon wives their husbands—in most worldly matters, Americans were

no longer willing to believe that a Mormon woman would commit a crime simply

because her religion taught or her husband told her to.

Much as non-Mormon Americans accepted—albeit uneasily—that the Prophet did

not abuse his power over his followers for economic gain, as World War II loomed on the

national horizon they also agreed that while any social control the Prophet exerted might

be obnoxious, it was not vicious. They also acknowledged that whatever control the

Church had over members was the result not of deception or brainwashing, but of the

107
"Smoot's Book Ban Draws Crossfire: Imported Mormon Writings Are Cited against His Plea
for Censorship in Tariff Bill," New York Times, February 24, 1930. See also "Senate Votes Censorship on
Obscene Books: Senator Smoot Twitted As He Talks Purity," Chicago Daily Tribune, March 19, 1930.
108
"Prosecutor Hits Waley Defense: In Plea to Jury He Attacks Wife's Story As Feigning
'Subjugation to Husband,'" New York Times, July 13, 1935; "Jury Convicts Mrs. Waley on Kidnap
Counts," Chicago Daily Tribune, July 14, 1935.
 161

choice of individual Mormons to remain within the Church and follow its dictates. As

popular historian Wallace Stegner wrote in his 1942 book of essays entitled Mormon

Country, the Mormons were a group of people "zealously willing to submerge their

individualism for the good of the society."109 The nation, about to enter another global

war, agreed that there was nothing more American than individual sacrifice for the

common good.

American Mormons: "Founder[s] of a civilization in the desert."110

Between 1917 and 1942, the United States fought the first World War, struggled

through a devastating economic depression, and watched the seemingly inevitable

escalation of the second World War that culminated in the Japanese attack on Pearl

Harbor in 1941 and the United States' entry into the war. In the face of such pressures,

Americans focused less on their divisions and more on the shared values and experiences

that united them. And as the theocratic State of Deseret and its polygamous inhabitants

faded into distant memory, non-Mormon Americans focused on the valiant

accomplishments of the all-American values demonstrated by the Mormon pioneers and

their descendants: hard work, thrift, self-sacrifice in the face of great community need,

and faith adhered to even in the face of persecution. Many Americans did their best in the

face of extreme challenges to embrace the nation's highest ideals of tolerance and

equality for all religious communities. As United States Commissioner of Education Dr.

109 QQ

110
Advertisement, New York Times, September 26, 1926. For James H. Snowden, The Truth about
Mormonism.
 162

P. P. Claxton put it, "Not groups of any kind, but free men, women, and children make up

the people of the United States. The spirit of Americanization is the spirit of freedom and

recognition of manhood as above all groups."111

If Americans needed proof that the Mormons were loyal, patriotic citizens of the

United States, the Saints provided ample evidence during World War I. In addition to the

Church's voluntary donation of 250,000 bushels of grain to feed American troops,

individual Mormons also served in the military in numbers the rest of the nation viewed

as more than respectable. They acquitted themselves so well on the ground in Europe that

when Belgium's King Albert visited the United States in 1919 he traveled to Salt Lake

City and delivered a speech in the Tabernacle thanking the veterans of the Army's 91 st

Division, which was primarily composed of soldiers from the heavily Mormon
119

population of the western United States.

Mormons continued their support of respected national organizations in

peacetime. The Church was counted as one of the many "patriotic and service

organizations" sponsoring Boy Scout troops in the 1920s, with 575 registered troops in

1925.113 Mormon Scout troops routinely made national news throughout the interwar

111
"Americans in Spite of Race and Origin," New York Times, March 16, 1919. The article quotes
from Claxton's "Americanism and Racial Groups." In addition to advocating racial unity—among various
whites, at least—Claxton declared that the United States "does not consist of Christians and Jews and
Mohammedans, of Catholics and Protestants, of Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians, and Christian
Scientists and Mormons, but of a hundred millions and more individuals, some of them members of or
affiliated with one or another of these and a hundred and more religious bodies, or with none."
112
"Albert Pays Tribute to 91 st Division: Speaks in Mormon Tabernacle—He and Prince again
Spend Hours in Locomotive," New York Times, October 10, 1919. For a brief history of the 91 st Division,
including the states from which it drew recruits during World War I see, "91 st Training Division," Army
Reserve. Online at http://usar.armv.mil.
113
"Boy Scouts," New York Times, March 22, 1925. The Mormons, who reported just over half a
million members in 1920, were in 1925 supporting almost as many troops as the long-established
 163

years, as young Saints participated as Boy Scouts in public celebrations and traveled

throughout the United States from Hawaii to New York.114 Perhaps most importantly, the

Saints were only one among many religious groups in the United States that supported

the organization. As The New York Times declared in 1935, "almost all religious

denominations Catholic, Jewish, Protestant and Mormon, sponsor Scout troops."115 Here

the Mormons not only proved their interest in inculcating good American values in their

boys but also their desire to be good neighbors with Americans of other faiths.

The Mormons' outreach was not merely civic and the Saints maintained active

missions throughout the United States and around the world. But many Americans no

longer feared these missions. When the Mormons purchased land in Washington, D.C.

for their first church in the nation's capital, The New York Times provided a dry factual

report without any editorial comment.116 The Chicago Daily Tribune report on the subject

mentioned polygamy, but only to report that the Church's representative said that plural

marriage was not raised as an issue in the sale.117 Both articles noted that the new church

was to be built in a neighborhood occupied largely by foreign embassies, but neither

implied that this address was symbolic of any un-American tendencies (as writers twenty

years earlier almost certainly would have). Rather, they noted the development as a sign

Episcopalians, more than half as many as the much larger Roman Catholic Church, and approximately half
the number of troops that Baptists reported.
114
"Boy Scouts," New York Times, November 16, 1924, which reports a year's worth of
community service among the Boy Scouts of Utah; "183 Mormon Boy Scouts Here," New York Times,
August 23, 1935; Frederick Gruin, "Boy Scout Trails Lead to Democracy: In Washington the Boy Scouts
Renew Their Faith and Their Pledge to Serve Others," New York Times, June 27, 1937.
115
"The Boy Scout Trail Is Now a Highway: In Its First Twenty-Five Years Five Million
American Lads Have Traveled along It," New York Times, February 10, 1935. See also, "Boy Scout Idea
Hailed: Officials of Three Churches Acclaim the Movement," New York Times, March 16, 1936.
116
"Mormons Will Erect Church in Washington, Amid Embassies, a Mile from White House,"
May 15, 1924.
117
"Mormons Move to Washington; Talk of Polygamy Derided," May 15, 1924.
 164

that the Mormons were moving up into the world, growing in size and building churches

in fashionable neighborhoods.

At the same time that Mormon church buildings were beginning to dot the

American landscape well beyond the confines of the intermountain West, the Mormon

Tabernacle Choir began to create its reputation as an American—and not just a

Mormon—institution. The choir, already famous around the country because of

performance tours and tourism to Salt Lake City, began weekly national radio broadcasts

in 1929. But while the choir's radio program remained popular throughout the interwar

years and beyond, critics and listeners alike neatly divorced its religious identity from its

performances. Thus the choir's recordings, for example, were advertised not as sacred

music, but under the category "Standard Songs and Instrumentals."119 The Choir joined a

long list of political candidates as patriotic and inspirational but decidedly non-
190

denominational programming out of the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City.

As Mormons increasingly intermingled with their non-Mormon neighbors, often

striking a nondenominational tone in their public addresses and avoiding reminders of

their religion's peculiar tenets, many rejoiced that the Saints were becoming more like the
191

rest of Americans. In fact, observers looked to the Mormons as a model for

rejuvenating flagging membership in other Christian communities, noting their rapid

118
"The Microphone Will Present—: Two Philharmonic Symphony Concerts from Stadium This
Week—Mormon Choir and Organ Go on the Air," New York Times, July 14, 1929.
119
Advertisement for Victrola, New York Times, December 31, 1925.
120
Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1932 campaign speech from the Tabernacle was touted as the most
widely broadcast political address of that political season. See "Nation to Hear Roosevelt," New York
Times, September 17, 1932.
121
"Mormons Spread over Continent: Its Influence Is No Longer Confined to Utah—Notable
Gathering of Members at Salt Lake City—The New Meaning of Zion," New York Times, December 18,
1927.
 165

growth and hailing their effective youth education programs. And while the

contemporary Mormons enjoyed some acceptance as model Americans, during the

interwar years Americans continued to view their pioneer ancestors as true models of

America's strength and virtues.

While Americans prior to World War I admired the hardiness and industry of the

Mormon pioneers, after World War I non-Mormons and Mormons alike embraced the

Mormon exodus to the West as one of the greatest stories in American history. One

representative observer called the Mormon pioneer experience "one of the great and

marvelous treks of history" and told readers that the reality was so extraordinary that

"only a pale fragment of the truth" could be told. Using language that would have

scandalized Gentiles of an earlier generation, writers hailed the Saints' decades-long

journey West as "one of the most American of adventures, one profoundly moving in its

courage and imaginative quality."124 As Americans romanticized everything about the

i •ye

closed frontier, the Mormons were hailed as the West's greatest colonizers.

Writers focused on applauding the Saints' contributions to the nation frequently

ignored the Mormon pioneers' shortcomings, as judged by non-Mormon Americans, as

See "Membership Wanes in Rural Churches," New York Times, June 7, 1931, and "Moral
Awakening Urged for Youth," New York Times, August 4, 1936.
123
"Monopolies Retard Upturn, Says Borah," New York Times, July 25, 1934.
124
"A Mirror to America's Past: Dramatic and Human Scenes Culled from the Nation's History,"
rev. American Memory: Being a Mirror of the Stirring and Picturesque Past of Americans and the
American Nation edited by Henry Beston (New York: Farrar & Reinhart, 1937), New York Times,
November 28, 1937.
125
R. L. Duffus, for example, who frequently wrote about the Mormons for The New York Times,
declared that if the intermountain deserts had truly been uninhabited when gold seekers headed for
California, the West might still be frontier. But the Mormons had already made their way to Utah, and their
services in supplying emigrants on their way to the west coast proved decisive in furthering American
settlement. See "The West That Has Come of Age: Its Growing Political and Economic Power, Which
President Coolidge Has Sensed from His Black Hills Retreat, Embodies the Vigorous Spirits of the Three
Wests," August 21, 1927.
they lionized their accomplishments. As a reviewer noted of one biographer of a Mormon

pioneer, "He discusses none of their creeds or beliefs; he deals with them as pioneers, as

among the most daring and resourceful of those who opened up the West."126 Rather

than the Polygamist-in-Chief, to such writers Brigham Young was "that master

colonizer" whose intelligence and foresight planted the "little oases" of Mormon towns

still found throughout Utah.127 Visitors labeled Salt Lake City "one of the fairest cities

and places in America," and the Tabernacle represented the best, most "heartfelt and
19R

simple," qualities of American music and culture. Others declared that the Mormon

irrigation practices that "made the desert bloom as the rose" would be the basis for

further American settlement in the arid intermountain region.129 Such celebratory

accounts subsumed Mormon empire-building under the larger umbrella of American

Manifest Destiny: the Mormon pioneers "added an empire to the nation."130

Individual Mormons capitalized on this interest in their past, and for the first time

Mormons and former Mormons were congratulated not for excoriating the faith of their

fathers but rather for celebrating it. Beginning in the 1930s, painter Lane Newberry

exhibited images of his forebears during the Nauvoo and Utah periods.131 While some

critics accused Vardis Fisher of treating Joseph Smith with too light a touch in his

126 "jjjg ]y[ orm0 n Leatherstocking," rev. Mormon Settlement in Arizona: A Record of Peaceful
Conquest of the Desert by James H. McClintock, New York Times, July 10, 1921.
127
"Reclaiming New York's Outskirts," editorial, New York Times, November 6, 1926.
128
'"And the Desert Shall Blossom As the Rose'; The Miracle of the West," New York Times,
August 2, 1925. The Mormons themselves, borrowing a text from the Bible, first declared that they would
make the desert bloom as the rose (see Isaiah 35:1). In the twentieth century, non-Mormon also began to
celebrate the image.
129
Ray Lyman Wilbur, "Irrigation: Miracle of the Arid West," New York Times, June 28, 1931.
130
"Utah at Fair Hails Mormon Pioneers," New York Times, July 25, 1939
131
See Eleanor Jewett, "Lane Newberry Paintings Tell State History," February 28, 1934; Eleanor
Jewett, "Lane Newberry Has Exhibit of Mormon Trail," Chicago Daily Tribune, December 20, 1937.
 167

Children of God, he nevertheless received won the 1939-1940 Harper Novel Prize for his

novel of early Mormonism.132 And publisher Houghton Mifflin awarded $1,000 to

Utahan Maurine Whipple for the development of her first novel, The Giant Joshua,

which a New York Times reviewer later called an "oddly exciting novel" about "an

heroic, dogged people, often wayward, often erring, who made a specialty of performing

the impossible."133 Whether they remained within the community or not (Whipple did,

while Fisher did not), Mormons were no longer required to be ashamed of their heritage.

Capitalizing on the mania for all things pioneer, the federal government, several

states, and the Church all participated in vigorous monument building campaigns

beginning in the mid-1930s. In the space of a few years they erected monuments to

Moroni in upstate New York (1935); to the Mormons who died at Winter Quarters,

Nebraska, on the Mormon Trail (1936); to the Joshua tree, supposedly named by early

Mormon settlers for the biblical leader who led the Israelites into the Promised Land

(1936); to all of the emigrants who traveled the Oregon Trail at Scotts Bluff, Nebraska

(1937) and Fort Laramie (1938); and to the Mormon Battalion who fought in the Mexican

War (1940).134 The New York Times estimated, in a story on the Church's announcement

of a $250,000 monument planned for the spot from which Brigham Young looked down

U1
See note 78.
133
On the award, see "Book Notices," New York Times, June 13, 1938. The review is Edith H.
Walton, "Maureen Whipple's Novel about Mormons Is an Arresting Piece of Work," rev. of Maurine
Whipple, The Giant Joshua (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941), January 12, 1941.
134
See "Mormons Dedicate Moroni Monument," New York Times, July 22, 1935; "Monument
Depicts Mormons' Ordeal: Statues Near Omaha Mark the 'Winter Quarters' Where 600 Died in the Years
1846-47," New York Times, September 20, 1936; "825,340-Acre Monument Set Up for Joshua Tree," New
York Times, August 19, 1936; "Saga Told in Museum: Oregon Trail History Is Shown in Memorial at
Scotts Bluff," New York Times, January 17, 1937; "Fort Laramie Made a Shrine," New York Times,
December 11, 1938; "Santa Fe Monument," New York Times, June 23, 1940. The Chicago Daily Tribune
also covered the dedication of each of these monuments.
 168

into the Salt Lake Valley and supposedly declared "This is the place," the Mormons had

erected a total of more than eighty monuments between New York and Utah by 1938.

This string of monuments, historic sites, and national parks invited all Americans to visit

the lands hallowed by the blood of the Mormon pioneers who served as the vanguard of

the nation's westward expansion.

As the outward differences that once drove non-Mormons' violent intolerance of

the Saints faded, Americans began to acknowledge and even celebrate the Mormons'

persistence in the face of persecution. Their flight was, as one writer explained, the "last

of the great religious hegiras."136 As early as 1918, the great novelist of the American

frontier Willa Cather wrote, in My Antonia, a brief story about the introduction of the

sunflower on the western prairies by Mormons who scattered seeds along the trail they

followed in search of a land where they could worship freely. Her final reflection on the

Saints made them standard bearers of American ideals into the West: "that legend has

stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to

freedom."137

Non-Mormons who focused on the Saints' as heroic settlers founding American

outposts in the unsettled desert in search of religious freedom, reimagined the Saints as

new Western Pilgrims. In a period when historians were reestablishing the Puritans' good

name, many writers explicitly compared the founders of America's first New Jerusalem

and the Mormon settlers who established the nation's western Zion. One writer noted the

135
"Mormons to Mark 'This Is the Place': Will Erect $250,000 Monument Where Brigham Young
Stood When He Decided on Settlement," New York Times, February 13, 1938.
136
"A New Challenge to the Pioneer Spirit: American Frontiers of Old Have Gone, But Others
Have Now Appeared," New York Times, March 10, 1935.
 169

comparison in an article about the rediscovery of Joseph and Hyrum Smith's graves in

Illinois. After the Smiths' murder in 1844, the Mormons buried them in a secret location

in order to protect the bodies from desecration. When builders in Nauvoo stumbled across

what they believed to be the graves in 1928, the reporter reflected that "the Mormons,

like the Pilgrim Fathers in the Mayflower, risked everything that life holds dear for the
1 ^R

dearer privilege of worshiping as they saw fit." Even Joseph Smith, the father of

American polygamy himself, was made new in the light of American nostalgia for the

men and women who had lived and died to establish American freedoms.

But Americans did not view Utah as "born in blood and sacrifice" simply to

afford the Saints the freedom to worship their own peculiar God in their own peculiar

way.139 Some went so far as to assert (undoubtedly to the Saints' delight) that the

Mormons' unique beliefs were themselves truly American. As The New York Times

reported to readers, the Mormons understood themselves as such, explaining in an

editorial in the Church-owned Deseret News that "[m]ore than one hundred years ago the

Lord declared, 'I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men

whom I raised up to the very purpose.'"140 No one revered the Constitution more than the

Mormons, it seemed. But while past generations might have scoffed at such claims,

contemporary scholars gave credence to Mormon claims that they were thoroughly

American. Anne Miller Downes, for instance, in one of the many studies of the burned-

over district in upstate New York that proliferated in this period, argued that Mormon
138
"Old Memories of the West," editorial, New York Times, January 22, 1928.
139
"The Westward Trek That Made a New America," New York Times, July 10, 1938.
140
"Mormons Back Landon: Newspaper Owned by Church Cites Doctrine on Constitution,"
November 1, 1936.
 170

theology encapsulated American thought more generally. She finally saw in the Mormons

and their brethren born of upstate New York's revivals "a thoughtful affirmation of belief

in American values."141

The ultimate American embrace of this lionized version of the heroic Mormon

Pilgrims came in the 1940 film Brigham Young—Frontiersman. The film tells the story

of the first Mormon wagon train to enter Utah, carefully avoiding controversial issues

like the Saints' peculiar religious beliefs, plural marriage, and unprovoked Mormon

violence against Gentiles. Before the Mormons hit the trail, the filmmakers explain their

flight by showing a mob attack on a happy Mormon family hosting a square dance for

their neighbors. The mob eventually burned the family's home to the ground and beat the

patriarch to death when he refused their order to spit on the Book of Mormon. Soon

thereafter, like-minded Gentiles put Joseph Smith on trial for unnamed charges, but

essentially because of his peculiar beliefs. When Smith's attorneys refuse to speak on his

behalf, Brigham Young, played by Tyrone Power, steps to the front of the courtroom and

declares that the point is not whether Smith's religion is right or not, but "whether Joseph

Smith or any other American citizen has a right to worship God as he chooses." Young

goes on to tell the court that the Mormons are simply seeking freedom of religion like so

many others in American history: the Puritans in Massachusetts, the Quakers in

Pennsylvania, and the Roman Catholics in South Carolina. To deny Mormons the right to

worship freely, he declares, is to deny the Constitution itself. The argument does not

work, of course: Smith is killed and his followers are forced out of Nauvoo. But after a

141
"Up-State New York," rev. Anne Miller Downes, Until the Shearing (New York: Frederick A.
Stokes, 1940), New York Times, November 3, 1940.
 171

fairly standard recitation of emigrant hardships on the trail (hunger, bad weather, illness,

and Indians), Young leads his the Saints into their Promised Land and begins establishing

a community built on "labor and love and fellowship," where a young Gentile woman is

just as welcome to help build and benefit from the new Zion as any believing Mormon.

These Saints not only ask freedom for themselves, but grant it willingly to any who wish

to labor alongside them.142

The greatest proof of the nation's moderated view of the Mormons came at a

moment of national tragedy. On January 2, 1942, the government held the first official

memorial service for the American men and women killed when the Japanese attacked

Pearl Harbor one month earlier. As reported in both The New York Times and the

Chicago Daily Tribune, the public memorial service was brief, and primarily composed

of native Hawaiian observances: the service began with the singing of "Aloha Oe," and

ended with the Daughters of Hawaii placing leis on the graves and temporary grave

markers. The only Christian prayer offered at the service was delivered by Keawe

Kapellela, a native Mormon missionary.143 At the beginning of World War II, the

Mormons were American enough to represent all Americans and all Christians on this

most solemn of public occasions. Their entry into the mainstream seemed complete.

Brigham Young: Frontiersman (USA: 20 Century Fox, 1940). Despite poor reviews upon its
release in 1940, the film went on to become a staple of the new medium of television, and was routinely
recycled by the networks throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
143
"Honolulu's Tribute Is Paid to War Dead: Citizens Join in Memorial Service at Navy Men's
Graves," New York Times, January 2, 1942, and "Honolulu Marks Memorial Day for Raid Victims:
Services at the Graves; Churches Filled," Chicago Daily Tribune, January 2, 1942, an extended version of
the same article published by The New York Times.
 172

Chapter 4

Protestant, Catholic, Jew... Mormon?: Mormons and the Mainstream, 1942-1966

American images of the Saints improved in the years leading up to America's

entrance into World War II. The Mormons' support of the nation with Church food stores

and individual service during World War I and the community's determined (if

unsuccessful) efforts to get off the national dole during the Great Depression had proved

in hard national times that the Mormons were willing to sacrifice for the good of the

country. And as Cold War fears of the Soviet threat grew after World War II, Americans

rushed to affirm their unity with anyone who was against the godless Communists. At the

same time, Americans' respect for the Mormons' patriotism and community spirit

combined with a national craze for all things Wild West to recast the Saints' polygamous

and theocratic ancestors as hardy pioneers paving the way West for other Americans

pursuing the nation's Manifest Destiny in mass media including newspapers, television,

and film.

But while such positive images of the Saints characterized the surface of the

national consciousness, old habits die hard and images of suspect Mormon beliefs and

behaviors were not erased. Even as the Saints were regularly listed among the nation's

major religions—Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Mormon—by national newspapers, images of

their peculiar past and the present dangers that they might present to non-Mormons

persisted, particularly in popular novels and histories. When George Romney became the
 173

first Mormon since the Prophet Joseph Smith to run for President, widespread images of

unity once again took a backseat to lingering American fears about the Saints.

Religion: "this strange Mormon theory"1

Gentile Americans were not able to reconcile themselves to all of the peculiarities

of Mormon theology even in the interest of national unity. Instead, in the most

widespread sources—national newspapers and Hollywood films—they simply ignored

what they had once ridiculed and reviled. Thus many public discussions of the Saints

religion focused on their inspiringly simple faith and homespun piety. While Moroni's

delivery of the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith occasionally made the papers—usually

in the context of the Saints' summer pageant at Palmyra in upstate New York—

Americans generally made a habit of ignoring the uncomfortable intricacies of odd

rituals, ongoing revelation, and prophets, patriarchs, and priestly hierarchies.

Despite the general trend in the direction of unity, books that focused on the

Mormons' theological beliefs rather than avoiding or ignoring them frequently produced

resounding condemnations. In 1945, Fawn McKay Brodie published what remains among

the most famous biographies of Joseph Smith ever written.2 Brodie, who was raised a

Mormon, received high praise from non-Mormon reviewers for her "tasteful and probing

volume," which Bernard DeVoto called "the first honest and intelligent biography of

1
Jan Morris, As I Saw the U.S.A. (New York: Pantheon, 1956), 134.
2
No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945; New
York: Vintage Books, 1995). Citations from the 1995 edition.
 174

Joseph Smith."3 Mormons, on the other hand, referred to the book as "the Brodie

atrocity."4 Brodie earned such Gentile praise and Mormon censure for declaring Joseph

Smith both a genius and a fraud. Smith was, she declared, a brilliant and ambitious man

whose religious "inspirations" began as a con that he eventually came to believe himself.

But perhaps her most damning assessment was not of Smith but of the people who

believed in him: "He was a mythmaker of prodigious talent. And after a hundred years

the myths he created are still an energizing force in the lives of a million followers. The

moving power of Mormonism was a fable—one that few converts stopped to question,

for its meaning seemed profound and its inspiration was contagious."5 According to

Brodie, past and present Mormon believers accepted Smith's religion because it was a

good story and Smith a convincing storyteller. Mormons, she declared, ascribed to a set

of beliefs that even a cursory interrogation showed were implausible and untrue. Like so

many before her, in the final analysis Brodie condemned the Saints as foolish and

gullible.

While Brodie agreed with those earlier authors who decried Joseph Smith as a

fraud, novelist Norman Furnas adopted the psychological explanation of Smith's

prophetic experiences popular around the turn of the twentieth century and notably

3
Vardis Fisher, "Mormonism and Its Yankee Prophet," rev., New York Times, November 25,
1945; DeVoto quote in untitled advertisement, New York Times, January 7, 1946. Unless otherwise noted,
all newspaper citations in this chapter are from the Proquest Historical Newspaper Database. Accessed via
the Boston University Libraries, online at http://www.bu.edu/libraries.
4
John K. Hutchens, "People Who Read and Write: Ex-Mormon," New York Times, January 20,
1946. According to Hutchens, a newspaper run by the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints commonly referred to the book as such.
5
Brodie, Preface to the first edition, ix.
 175

rejuvenated by cultural historian Bernard DeVoto in 1930.6 Whereas Brodie interpreted

Smith's revelations as lies that he eventually sold to himself as well as his followers, in

The Devil's Rainbow, a novel that followed the nascent Latter-day Saint community from

Smith's first days in Kirtland until his final days in Nauvoo, Furnas labeled Smith a

cunning madman. His first description of the Prophet, seen through the eyes of an

illiterate boy in backwoods Ohio, made his opinion of Smith clear. After watching Smith

wandering in a seemingly drunken and disoriented way through the forest the boy sees

him collapse to his knees with his face pressed to the ground for several minutes, and

then

he come to and rared up on his knees and commenced gaping into the treetops
again. His mouth was hanging slobbery open and his face was dead white. It was
all kind of like he was praying, only his lips didn't move and his eyes was staring
wide. [...] all bugged out like they'd jiggle if you shook him the way an egg
jiggles when you shake the skillet. A big wet leaf dead and brown from fall was
plastered on his forehead with the stem sticking up. [...] he looked real wild. But
not funny.7

But Smith is cunning, as well as crazy. Furnas went on to describe a man who is sloppy

and loose in private but quiet and dignified in front of his public. This Smith preached

fire and brimstone at his followers, condemning them as sinful if they have not purchased

one of his "Golden Bibles" and thereby put money in his pocket. And those Golden

Bibles are full of nonsense: "Some of it almost made sense but then it got away from you

6
Furnas, The Devil's Rainbow (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962). In an explanatory
afterword, Furnas not only approvingly notes DeVoto's theories—which he claims he read only after he
had completed writing his novel—but also I. Woodbridge Riley's 1903 psychological biography of Smith
(see ch. 2, p. 13).
7
4.
 176

and into a string of little words and you lost it again."8 The author admitted in an epilogue

that this was a novel with a purpose: he wanted to contradict the Church's "deliberate,

able manipulation" of public opinion, by which it presented "the old Mormons as sturdy,

worthy, self-respecting if wholesomely queer folk scandalously persecuted for their

faith."9 His novel, he asserted, told the real story of an insane con man and the credulous

dupes who followed him.

Many in the national news media answered the unanswerable problem of Mormon

belief in ongoing revelation and living prophets by simply ignoring them. Instead, they

focused on the wholesome, patriotic Mormons of the present-day and the way their

religion served their nation. Whereas reports on missionaries, for example, had once been

the stuff of penny dreadfuls, alleging that Mormon missions were designed to provide

young women for polygamy or voters for the Mormon political machine, as Americans

marched onto the international stage for the second major war of the twentieth century

the Mormons' experiences abroad became a national asset. Beginning in the 1940s the

skills that Mormons gained on their international missions were used in the national

interest. Less than one month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Senator Elbert D.

Thomas of Utah (who had won Reed Smoot's seat in 1932) aired the first of his monthly

wartime radio broadcasts to Japan. Thomas, who served seven years as a missionary in

Japan, was America's version of Tokyo Rose, telling the Japanese in their own language

that their war efforts were doomed and encouraging the Japanese people to revolt against

"28.
9
338.
 177

their leaders.10 After the war ended the Soviet Union routinely labeled Mormon

missionaries in Soviet bloc countries as spies, sometimes accusing the Mormons of

disseminating anti-Soviet propaganda. While the Saints denied that their missionaries

were engaged in espionage, the sacred status of the American Constitution in their

religion undoubtedly colored their ministries abroad in ways the Communists would not

accept but that average Americans would have applauded.11

At home, especially after World War II ended and Americans began looking for

ways to enjoy themselves again, Saints and Gentiles alike continued to promote Mormon

sacred sites as tourist attractions. Palmyra, New York, the site of Joseph Smith's earliest

revelations and of a new monument to the angel Moroni, routinely made The New York

Times' list of attractions for tourists and, after 1950, was regularly written up as a site of

interest for city-dwelling motorists looking for weekend getaways. The Church pageant,

"America's Witness for Christ," in which Latter-day Saint actors pantomimed the story

of Moroni leading Smith to the gold plates alongside the story contained in the Book of

Mormon itself, was a special attraction. But articles generally rushed through only the

barest essentials of the stories told by the pageant. Travel writers instead devoted most of

their attention to impressive technical aspects of the staging, convenient driving routes

See "Senator Portrays Japan's Weakness: Thomas of Utah Says When Tokyo Falls Empire Is
Done, and All Is Centered There," December 30, 1941; "Broadcast Warns Japanese on War: Thomas of
Utah, in Their Language, Scores 'Betrayal' by War Lords," January 1, 1942
11
See "Soviets Call Missionaries Spies," New York Times, June 14, 1951; "Ousted Mormons Here
from Europe: 'We'll Meet Again When Red Star Is Over America,' One Says Czech Police Boasted," New
York Times, May 8, 1950.
 178

and area lodging, and a recap of the thousands drawn to the site each summer for the

performances.

In the middle of the country, the Chicago Daily Tribune advertised the town of

Nauvoo as a nearby attraction for residents of Chicagoland. During the War, when all

Americans were being called on to sacrifice for a greater cause, the paper noted in an

article on the attractions of Nauvoo that Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were killed

after they "gave themselves up to protect their followers."13 A 1946 front-page article

emphatically declared that the Mormon "religious haven" was "Spun from the Nation's

Pioneer Ideals," and the following year the paper proudly announced that one of Brigham

Young's daughters had returned to Nauvoo to accept a key to the city.14 Similar articles

throughout the 1950s and '60s invited people to explore the "tourist mecca" in this

"Williamsburg of the Midwest."15 Most writers made only vague references to the Saints'

religion in spite of the controversies over Smith's political activities and plural marriage

that had driven the Mormons out of Illinois. In many cases they attributed the murders

and expulsion to "political and theological controversies."16 One writer would only say

that Smith ordered the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor because it "bitterly criticized"

See "Mormon Pageant Set," August 9, 1951; Warren Weaver, "A Bow to History: New York
Times Using the Past to Make the Present a Bit Livelier," July 17, 1955. "20,000 at Mormon Pageant,"
August 19, 1955, estimated a nightly attendance of 20,000 spectators, and "Mormons' Pageantry: 20th
Annual Production Near Palmyra, N.Y.," July 28, 1957, announced that the total number of attendees in
1956 was over 70,000.
13
"Thousands Sip the Wine of Hope at Nauvoo Fete," September 13, 1942.
14
"Nauvoo! Spun from the Nation's Pioneer Ideals," April 1, 1946; "Seven Mormon Pioneers
Visit Nauvoo—By Air: Daughter of Brigham Young Is Pilgrim," July 23, 1947.
15
Louise Hutchinson, "Nauvoo Restoring Old Mormon Scene," September 2, 1962.
16
"Nauvoo Offers Guest Double History Dose," Chicago Daily Tribune, July 8, 1951.
 17

him. To the latter, the temple was a "tragedy" for modern tourists because the grand

edifice, which would have been a sight worth seeing for modern travelers, had been

destroyed in the 1840s. Writers seldom mentioned polygamy—and quickly glossed over

it if they did—and almost never acknowledged other unique Mormon beliefs that

developed at Nauvoo. Instead, sanitized histories of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young

took their places alongside those of Mark Twain and a nineteenth-century Icarian French
1R

commune as fun and interesting attractions on tours of Illinois' pioneer past.

Salt Lake City, too, underwent a scrubbing in the newspapers, and the "Mormon

Capital" of the early twentieth century became a perfect base for travelers to the West.

The city itself was described as comfortable and spotlessly clean, thanks to the

"wholesome and constructive influence" of the Church.19 The temple and tabernacle were

depicted less as religious edifices than as Western marvels, two of the many "fascinating

sights" in the West alongside Yellowstone, Pike's Peak, the Tetons, and the Grand

Canyon. Even when Mormon religious ideas were stamped on the scenery, as at the

popular Zion National Park in southern Utah, they were regarded simply as "imaginative

names, many of them suggesting the religious fervor of the Mormon explorers." Writers

John Edstrom, "When Mormons Ruled Nauvoo: Sleepy Illinois Town Once Exceeded Chicago
in Size and Was Center of Great Historic Events," Chicago Daily Tribune, June 17, 1956.
18
George Bushnell, Jr., "Rail Tour Recalls Twain's Mississippi," Chicago Daily Tribune,
September 26, 1965. The article includes a picture of Smith's Mansion House at Nauvoo.
19
"Salt Lake City Is Spotless and Sightseeing Hub," Chicago Daily Tribune, July 18, 1948.
20
See, for example, Advertisement, New York Times, April 19, 1966.
 180

almost never explained the religious significance of names like Zion, Angels' Landing,

East and West Temple, or Mount Moroni.21

But Mormonism and its founder could not be entirely stripped of their unique—

and, for many non-Mormons, disquieting—beliefs. Writers of books, whose treatments of

their subjects were necessarily more in-depth than those of newspaper reporters,

frequently confronted Mormon religion. Even those with no apparent interest in

disproving the Saints' religion could not always ignore their peculiar religious ideas. In

one 1956 travelogue, the writer noted with an amused smirk that "[t]he visitor, inevitably

impressed by the results of their faith, is tempted to slur over its more unlikely tenets on
•yy

the grounds that so happy a society more than makes up for a few implausibilities." But

visitors to Utah could not, he argued, escape the "decided oddness" of a seemingly

modern community in which people "accepted without question all the peculiarities of

history and circumstance which are entwined in this strange Mormon theory." For this

traveler at least, Moroni's obscurity in his distant perch on top of the temple symbolized

the difficulty of seeing and understanding the religion that supposedly began with him.

The noted American author and essayist Aldous Huxley made no effort to hide his

distaste for Mormon beliefs and the culture they inspired. He was disgusted even by the

orderliness that so many other Americans admired. In an essay entitled "Faith, Taste, and

History," Huxley acknowledged the Latter-day Saints modern respectability, but then

21
See the captions in "Color Camera Tour through Wonders of the West," Chicago Daily Tribune,
May 19, 1946.
22
Morris, As I Saw the U.S.A., 136.
23
134, 136.
condemned the Mormons as representative of everything that was wrong with religion

and taste in the United States.24 Declaring that Mormons believed in their religion with

"all the fervor, all the unqualified literalness, of peasant faith in the thirteenth century,"

he asserted that their "uncomprehending reverence and superstitious alarm" made them

post-nuclear savages.25 The "astounding ugliness" and "vast essay in eccentric

dreariness" of Mormon public buildings was the tangible produce of these religious

beliefs. Huxley condemned the temple, which impressed so many visitors to Salt Lake,

for its "oddity, dullness, and monumentality." Likewise he condemned those who

admire such tangible fruits of the Mormon faith—Gentile and Mormon alike—in the

form of two fellow travelers whose religious affiliation he purposefully left ambiguous

even as he labeled them cave men.27 For this observer, the fact that many Americans had

begun to accept the Mormons as respectable was a sign of the decline of the mainstream,

rather than any improvement on the part of the Saints.

Like Huxley, many scholars of American religion could not fully suppress their

disdain for Mormonism (not that Huxley tried). Despite making radical changes to his

description of the Mormons in the 1950 edition of The Story of Religion in America,

William Warren Sweet still taps into key negative themes. His new description did

eliminate the blatant scorn that accompanied his description of the revivalists in general

and the Smith family in particular in the 1930 edition of the book. But while his

24
In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1956). A version of this essay appeared in the magazine Encounter (vol. 2 [January 1954]).
25
250, 237.
26
236-37.
 182

statements about the "magnificent social and economic institution" of the Church

reflected the milder opinion of the times, he still hints at the inordinate control the Church

exercised over its members: "There are few churches in the country which mold and

influence the daily life of its membership more than does the Mormon."28 While not

untrue, this emphasis on the hierarchy's control of members and the virtual absence of

any discussion of the Mormons beliefs or practices beyond the most salacious accusations

leveled against them during Joseph Smith's lifetime (which Sweet did label as

accusations rather than fact) left the reader with the impression that Mormonism was not

a very religious religion. Sweet effectively inaugurated a new era in which scholars of

American religion tended to subtly undermine rather than openly defame outsider

religions.

Later scholars followed Sweet's example. Textbooks published in the 1960s by

historians of American religion Sidney Mead and Winthrop Hudson focused entirely on

the Saints nineteenth-century past, evincing a quiet but marked distaste for the religious

enthusiasm from their religion sprung.29 Mead noted that the "leveling.. .trend of the

times" led to professional clergy being muscled out of their pulpits and replaced by

"demagogic preachers and revivalists," among whom he counted Smith.30 What such

men shared, in Mead's words, was an anti-intellectual appeal to emotions rather than

Mead, The Lively Experiment: the Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1963; Hudson, Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American
Religious Life (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965).
30
124-25. Interestingly, Mead also paints the great revivalist Charles Grandison Finney and the
father of liberal Protestantism, "America's Preacher," Henry Ward Beecher with the same brush.
 183

reason to inspire faith—a dangerous and irresponsible approach to religion.31 Neither

man tempered his criticism of nineteenth-century Mormonism with any discussion of the

Latter-day Saints in the twentieth. Like Huxley, who labels the Saints Neanderthals and

thirteenth-century peasants, when forced to confront them many Americans continued to

view Mormon religion as the product of an earlier superstitious and anti-modern era. And

as every school child knows, if you can't say anything nice then you shouldn't say

anything at all. Which is what many Americans did.

Polygamy: A Thin Line between Belief and Practice32

Although Americans generally accepted after the Smoot hearings that polygamy

was dying out with the last pioneer generation of Mormons, the topic would not die.

Early in the twentieth century authors generally set titillating stories of Mormon plural

marriage in the pioneer period. While such stories continued, after World War II writers

increasingly focused on the lingering traces of polygamy in the mid-twentieth century.

Many Saints and former Saints published family memoirs that explored their parents'

polygamous pasts and its impact on the present day. At the same time, a series of highly

publicized raids on small fundamentalist Mormon groups, whose members practiced

plural marriage into this period, raised public awareness of continuing polygamy in their

midst. And even as polygamy remained on the national radar, images of Mormon sexual

31
125-26.
32
See Samuel Woolley Taylor, / Have Six Wives: A True Story of Present-Day Plural Marriage
(New York: Greenberg Publisher, Inc., 1956), 13. Portions originally published in True: The Man's
Magazine (Nov., 1953).
depravity took a new turn as modern artists began exploring other damaging behavior

hidden behind the Mormons' squeaky-clean facade.

As with Mormon theological oddities, after 1942 the newspapers moved to gloss

over the Saints' past controversial marital practices. In 1945, for example, when Church

President Heber J. Grant died, the media rewarded him for his adamant denunciations of

polygamy and regular excommunication of any members involved in polygamy by

minimizing the fact that the prophet himself had had three wives at one time. Obituaries

carefully nuanced his marital status, with the Chicago Daily Tribune noting only that

Grant was survived "by his wife and nine daughters," making no mention of the two

wives who had pre-deceased him. The New York Times acknowledged Grant's

polygamy but noted that, after the Church forbade the practice, he stood "squarely for

monogamy."34 Clearly Grant's work to end plural marriage and bring Mormon's in line

with popular American morality was of greater import to non-Mormon observers than his

private practices.

A year earlier, coverage of official raids on polygamists in Utah, Arizona, and

Idaho had raised the specter of ongoing plural marriage, as fifty men and women were

arrested for crimes ranging from the standard charge of unlawful cohabitation to

kidnapping, carrying women across state lines to live as "mistress and concubine," and

even sending obscene material through the mail.35 But the national news coverage of the

raids and subsequent trials pointedly distanced the "Fundamentalist" groups from the

33
"Heber J. Grant, Mormon Church Leader, Dies," May 15, 1945.
34
"Heber J. Grant Dies; Mormon Leader, 88," May 15, 1945.
35
"Raids to Stamp Out Polygamy Net 50 Arrests," Chicago Daily Tribune, March 8, 1944.
 185

contemporary Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Nowhere did writers label the

groups Mormon: rather, they referred to them simply as "fundamentalists" (without

explaining what sort of fundamentalism they practiced) or, more colorfully, "plural mate

cultists." In general, articles acknowledged that the polygamists followed tenets long

ago abandoned by the Church.37 But hints of Mormon collusion with the practice crept

into the coverage: in one case, a Mormon bishop's actions were questioned because he

knew of the practices of one polygamous group but had not reported their unlawful
TO

behavior to the authorities.

As in previous eras, Mormon polygamy could be funny, too. The popular 1951

musical Paint Your Wagon by hit-makers Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe used

polygamy as comic relief in a story of the early days of the California Gold Rush. This

rough-and-tumble myth of the United States' westward expansion featured a subplot in

which miner Ben Rumson finds himself lonely and convinces a migrant Mormon with

two wives to sell one of his spouses for $500. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the popular

American perception of Mormon polygamy, the woman herself pleads to be auctioned off

because as a second wife at the mercy of the first her Mormon life is intolerable. While to

be purchased may be demeaning, at least now the woman will be her husband's only

wife. The musical therefore responds to Rumson's acquisition with the rollicking number

36
"U.S. Convicts 9 Utah Plural Mate Cultists," Chicago Daily Tribune, May 23, 1944;
37
See also "Utah Polygamists Found Guilty: 15 Defendants with 55 Plural Wives 'Prayed for'
Conviction to Get Supreme Court Test," New York Times, May 21, 1944; '"Get on Relief Was Advice to
Polygamy Cult: Celestial Wife Testifies in Trial of 32," Chicago Daily Tribune, September 28, 1944; '"Get
on Relief Was Advice to Polygamy Cult: Celestial Wife Testifies in Trial of 32," Chicago Daily Tribune,
September 28, 1944.
38
"Mormon Bishop Says He Fought Marriage Cult," Chicago Daily Tribune, September 30,1944.
 186

"Whoop-Ti-Yay," in which the full chorus celebrates the happy couple's wedding day.

Nothing more is heard or seen of the now happily monogamous Mormon husband and his

first wife. But the marriage-by-purchase is not a happy one, and as the story progresses

Rumson decides to improve his lot by selling his wife for a profit. The new husband is no

better off, however, as his "wife" runs away with another man before he can take

possession of her.39 Thus the musical's high jinks warned that any marriage in which a

woman does not have the power of choice is doomed.

In Samuel Woolley Taylor's 1951 memoir Family Kingdom, the question of a

woman's choice was more complicated.40 Taylor related the story of his father, the son of

nineteenth-century Church President John Taylor, and the author's mother, who was his

father's third wife and the last he married before 1890. For a time after the Manifesto the

author's father took no new wives. But eventually he approached his wives about adding

a fourth and fifth—young sisters—to their number. The author's mother feared the

impact of new wives and children on her financially strained family. Further, she

understood the potential for criminal charges against her husband and for his

excommunication from the Church. But, Taylor explained, "she had gone through too

much for the principle to deny it."41 In spite of her reservations—the only ones that the

author's limited perspective allows us to see—three additional wives eventually joined

the family. As a result, the author's father was eventually removed from his position as

39
Book and lyrics by Lerner, music by Loewe. Original Broadway Cast recording with liner notes
by Bill Rosenfield (USA: RCA Victor Broadway, 1951). CD.
40
New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1951.
 187

an Apostle and excommunicated from the Church. Thus divided from all of his contacts

in the Mormon community by that event, he could not support his families and each wife

had to shift for herself and her own children. While Taylor presented his family as part of

a dying breed, he reminded his readers that his mother was still alive, "a quaint

anachronism even among her own people,"42 as were the descendants of his father's six

wives and thirty-six children. He could not tell how many members of his own family

alone, formed and directly influenced by the practice of plural marriage, were living in

modern America: "How many cousins, uncles, nieces and nephews, and in-laws I have is

appalling to contemplate."43 Thus polygamy, though no longer widely practiced,

continued to be a part of the life of the modem Mormon community.

Though post-war authors occasionally suggested that the Mormon men who

practiced polygamy did so to satisfy their own lusts, occasionally offering exciting titles

like The Sex Life of Brigham Young, more often writers in this period adopted Taylor's

tone of slightly outraged bafflement.44 As Taylor himself declared, "the great perplexing

question, from an objective viewpoint, is why the practical, hardheaded, prosaic

Mormons embraced the sensationally impractical institution of plural marriage."45 In

1954 another descendant of polygamy, Brigham Young's grandson Kimball Young,

Kishkuman Cooper (pseud.), The Sex Life of Brigham Young (New York: Vantage Press, 1963).
See also Helen Beal Woodward's brief biography of Ann Eliza Young, Brigham Young's self-titled Wife
No. 19. In the parlance of pre-World War I discussions of polygamy, Woodward colorfully declared that
believers in polygamy regarded women "primarily as breeders" (315) and that husbands viewed each plural
wife as "satellite and easily duplicated household utility" (324-25). "Brigham's Other Wife: Ann Eliza
Young," The Bold Women (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953).
45
Family Kingdom, ix.
 188

published a serious scholarly study that attempted to answer this question. Young's book,

Isn 't One Wife Enough?, analyzed material on over one hundred polygamous families

that Young gathered from the ubiquitous Mormon pioneer diaries and the personal

recollections of the now-elderly children of plural marriages. According to Young,

Mormon men and women did not eagerly embrace plural marriage. Rather, "[a] good

many Saints had trouble adjusting themselves to the plural marriage system, because of

their strong puritan conscience and sense of guilt; but to the faithful it was the Word of

God and there was nothing else to be done but carry on."46 In spite of his mostly

successful attempt at objectivity and his general conclusion that the majority of

nineteenth-century Mormon plural marriages were both emotionally and financially

successful,47 Young betrayed a subtle sense of disapproval. The men Young described

did not marry: they "acquired" new wives. Like most outright critics of polygamy, Young

presented the system as treating women like objects that could be bought and sold.

Coverage of the highly-publicized raids in 1953 against polygamists living at

Short Creek on the Arizona-Utah border followed much the same pattern as reports of the

raids in 1944. Reporters avoided calling the "polygamous cult" Mormon and explained to

readers that despite the Mormon background of the practice, "polygamy has been a dead

46
(New York: Holt, 1954), 55.
47
According to Young, on a five-point scale 53% of polygamous families were totally harmonious
or mostly so, with another 25% neither extraordinarily harmonious or acrimonious. In economic terms,
approximately one half of families were wealthy or very comfortable, and another one-third were
comfortable but not wealthy (57-58). Thus his study argued that only one-fifth of polygamous families
suffered from severe emotional or financial distress. Young does not, unfortunately, compare his estimates
of the emotional and financial health of polygamous families in the latter half of the nineteenth century to
similar data for monogamous families during the same period.
 189

issue in the church for more than sixty years."48 But in 1956 Samuel Woolley Taylor

offered Americans a different take on contemporary polygamy. In his book I Have Six

Wives, based on interviews with and observations of polygamists in and around Salt Lake

City, Taylor asserted that fundamentalists were not only living in isolated communities in

the desert but were walking among us in America's cities disguised as seemingly normal,

respectable families. But plural marriage remained repugnant, despite such families'

efforts to live average, middle-class American lives: "Those living next door to polygamy

couldn't care less about legal hair-splitting and academic discussions of liberty. They just

want this viper out of their bosom."49 As for the Mormon connection, Taylor claimed that

the fundamentalists had infiltrated the institution that publicly condemns them, and are

"boring away from within at the vitals of the Mormon Church."50 Their intent was not to

destroy the Church, but rather to take it over from within. And make no mistake, Taylor

believed that the Church was vulnerable: "the Mormon reaction to the Fundamentalist

creed [....] is born of fear. Modern Mormons believe in plural marriage, but not its

practice. The more deeply immersed a Mormon becomes in his religion, the thinner the

line may become between belief and practice."51 In short, Taylor warned Americans,

every believing Mormon had the potential to succumb to polygamy as a result of the

Church's teachings.

Gladwin Hill, "Arizona Raids Polygamous Cult; Seeks to Wipe Out Its Community," New York
Times, July 27, 1953. The Times ran this initial report on the front page.
49
272.
50
25.
51
13. Emphasis in original.
 190

More than ten years later, with polygamous communities still going strong in

spite of state and federal efforts to stamp them out, The New York Times published an

interview with a polygamist who explained his practice of plural marriage as real

Mormonism. Polygamists, the Times informed readers, could look to the words and deeds

of "some of the most revered names in Mormon history" in support of the practice. Even

though the present leaders of the Church did not practice polygamy themselves, they all

came from polygamous families. Further connecting the Church to its polygamous black

sheep, the article pointed out that the Manifesto did not carry the weight of revelation but

rather "advises" Mormons to obey the law of the land. And in spite of this advice,

"Joseph Smith's revelation on plural marriage is still printed in 'Doctrine and

Covenants,' one of the sacred works of Mormonism." No wonder then, the article

implied, that modem-day "members of the L.D.S. Church have shown a reluctance to
e-y

participate in the prosecutions of persons accused of polygamy."

While plural marriage may have been treated with humor and nostalgia by some

in this period, in the popular mind the practice remained immoral and degrading. Women,

in particular, were believed to suffer in polygamy, and many novels examined "personal

and hopeless battle for self-fulfillment" that women faced in plural marriage. Elinor

Pry or's And Never Yield (1942) told the story of a young woman unconvinced by

Mormon religion who nevertheless stayed in the Church out of love for her devout

52
"Polygamist Tells Why He Holds to Discarded Mormon Doctrines," New York Times,
December 27, 1965.
53
Rose Feld, "A Mormon Wife," rev. of Elinor Pryor, And Never Yield (New York: MacMillan
Company, 1942), New York Times, May 3, 1942.
 191

husband, only to find herself forced to share him with additional wives.54 In her debut

novel, A Little Lower than the Angels (1942), Virginia Sorensen imagined the story of the

first Mormon woman to accept a second wife into her home at Nauvoo. The woman, like

Pryor's heroine, embraces Mormonism more out of love for her devout husband than out

of her own conviction, and she likewise accepts her husband's new wife for the sake of

his beliefs and not her own.55 But such struggles did not end for Mormon women with

polygamy. In her follow-up, On This Star (1946), Sorenson brought her examination of

the lot of Mormon women into the twentieth century, telling the story of a woman forced

to choose between the brilliant, exciting apostate she loves and the boring, reliable Saint

she does not. Inevitably, it seems, the young woman follows the dictates of her Church

rather than her heart and enters into a marriage built on shared faith rather than love.56

Each of these critically-acclaimed authors demonstrated that Mormonism not only forced

women to endure the shame and degradation of sharing their husbands, but perhaps more

importantly prevented them from finding personal fulfillment through romantic love.

This extrapolation of the damage that Mormon mores could inflict on people's

love lives took a dramatic turn in Alan Drury's 1959 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Advise

and Consent. Central to Drury's story is young Senator Brigham Anderson of Utah,

whose name and home state are enough to clearly identify his religious affiliation. But

"Brig" is no ordinary Mormon; he is an Apostle's son. Anderson is popular among his

colleagues in Washington, who respect his intelligence, integrity, and work ethic. But

54
New York: MacMillan Company, 1942.
55
Virginia Sorenson, A Little Lower Than the Angels (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942).
56
Virginia Sorenson, On This Star (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946).
 192

there are secrets lurking behind this saintly veneer, and eventually we discover that

Anderson's admiration of his teenage paper boy at the beginning of the book was

anything but innocent. In fact, Anderson has never truly loved anyone but a fellow soldier

whom he met in the south Pacific during World War II. He is homosexual. His wife

clearly suffers, without knowing why, because her husband does not love her as he

should. And when Anderson's political opponents discover the secret of his long-ago

affair and threaten to expose him, Anderson kills himself in order to avoid becoming a

political hostage or destroying his family with the shame of his exposure. Drury exploited

two contradictory popular images of the Mormons—the pious all-American and the

secret sexual deviant—and to demonstrate to readers that no one is that perfect.57

Perhaps simply to avoid what was for many readers a forbidden and distasteful

subject, book reviews never mentioned Anderson's dark sexual secrets. Nor did they

identify his religious background. They focused instead on the Cold War politics that

drove events in Drury's book. It is tempting to interpret these evasions as further

examples of the national media avoiding alienating the Mormons or perpetuating

negative impressions of them among other Americans in favor of promoting unity in the

face of a common enemy.58 Otto Preminger's film adaptation of Advise and Consent,

starring Peter Fonda as one of Anderson's opponents, observes no such niceties.

Preminger fought to keep Brigham Anderson's character and story intact, drawing
57
Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959.
58
See Charles Poore, "Books of the Times," New York Times, August 11, 1959; Robert Molloy,
"Novel of Politics Is Big, Timely, and Important," Chicago Daily Tribune, August 6, 1959; Richard L.
Neuberger, "Solons They Are, But Humans Too: The Virtues and Vices of the U.S. Senate Are Dramatized
in a Newspaperman's Novel," New York Times, August 16, 1959.
59
Starring Henry Fonda. USA: Columbia Pictures, 1962.
 193

national media attention first when he refused to let CBS edit out Anderson's

homosexuality in order to air the film.60 Eventually Preminger was part of a group of

filmmakers who convinced the Motion Picture Association of America to amend the Film

Production Code to allow explicit references to homosexuality.61 Thus Brigham

Anderson's repressed homosexuality, hidden beneath his Saintly exterior, found a wider

national audience through a new medium and the controversy the film created.

Representations of the Saints' sexual practices were dominated in this period by

images of past and ongoing polygamy, and thus the strange marital practices of a small

and dwindling portion of the Latter-day Saint community continued to represent all

Saints in the minds of many Americans. This impression was reinforced throughout the

period by hints that the Church was not really interested in prosecuting polygamous

fundamentalists, as well as claims that Church teachings kept all Mormons just a step

away from actively supporting plural marriage in this world. Whether addressing

polygamy, the place of women in Mormon marriages, or the darker sexual urges

repressed by the Church's teachings, Americans continued to traffic in images of sexually

deviant Saints.

George Gent, "Preminger Stops Film's Sale to TV," New York Times, May 10, 1965.
61
Eugene Archer, "Code Amended to Allow Films to Deal with Homosexuality," New York
Times, October 4, 1961.
Violence: "as inflexible, bigoted, and mulish as most religious fanatics"

As with other negative images of the Saints, the period during and after World

War II saw some relaxation of the image of Mormons as violent fanatics. Americans even

engaged in a bit of historical revisionism during World War II, with the publication of a

new edition of Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes mystery A Study in Scarlet.

When Doyle first published the book in 1886, nearly half the story was dedicated to a

detailed flashback revealing the murderer's motivation for his crimes: the two men he

killed in London, the man reveals, were Mormon polygamists who killed his true love's

father and forced her into a polygamous marriage that eventually destroyed her. But a

new edition in 1944 "dropped the tedious Mormon flashback" from the story and

substituted a brief synopsis of the events in "The Country of the Saints." The subplot that

warned readers in 1886 of the depths of depravity of which Brigham Young's Avenging

Angels were capable was no longer viewed as necessary—or even particularly

interesting—in a world in which Mormons were fighting fascism alongside their fellow

Americans.

Like religion and polygamy, the newspapers largely avoided the controversial

topic of Mormon violence. Similar revisionism also touched other aspects of the history

of Mormon-Gentile conflict in the United States. Two separate New York Times profiles

of President Harry S. Truman and his hometown of Independence, Missouri, celebrated

62
Robert Lewis Taylor, The Travels ofJaimie McPheeters (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958),
305.
63
Capt. Howard Haycroft, "Mr. Holmes of Baker Street: Three New Volumes Pay Varied
Homage to London's Greatest Bloodhound," New York Times, April 2, 1944. The volume in question is
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Textbook of Friendship edited by Christopher Morley (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1944).
 195

various aspects of the historic frontier town's past including the Mormon presence. Both

writers noted with interest that the Mormons regard Independence as sacred ground: one

mentioned that the Saints look forward to the erection of God's temple there, and the

other acknowledged the Mormons' belief that Independence was the site of the Garden of

Eden. But they avoided the violence that the Mormons endured in Independence almost

entirely. One writer ignored the history of conflict, focusing instead on the picture of

tolerance painted by recent homecoming festivities for Truman held in the local Mormon

tabernacle. The other noted in passing that Truman's ancestors "helped to drive" the

Mormons out of the area, but gave readers no indication of the brutality with which the

Mormons were driven.64 As in the years before World War II, writers tended to avoid

discussions of Mormon violence that implicated the nineteenth-century Saints' Gentile

neighbors.

Once again, books however were not as concerned as mass media with avoiding

stereotypes. Bernard DeVoto's 1947 history Across the Wide Missouri focused on the

"climax and decline" of the Rocky Mountain fur trade.65 The Mormons were but

peripheral characters in this narrative, and DeVoto did not moderate his distaste for the

Saints with plaudits for their effective and efficient colonization. Instead, he aimed brief,

pithy comments at what he saw as early Church leaders' penchant for violence. His

limited references to the Saints focused on the subject: Joseph Smith "loved to brandish

64
Cabell Phillips, "Truman's Hometown Is Smalltown, U. S. A.: Independence has traditions of
its own—of the pioneer, the prairie farmer, the Southern rebel," New York Times, July 1, 1945; Arthur
Krock, "The President—A New Portrait," New York Times, April 7, 1946.
65
Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1947.
swords," and the group of armed Mormons he led from Ohio to Missouri in a lackluster

attempt to reclaim land taken from the community of Saints in Independence by mob

violence was an army intent on occupying the city.66 DeVoto later compared Smith's

efforts to quash dissent at Nauvoo by ordering the destruction of a printing press and the

expulsion of a group of apostates, the literal human sacrifices once ordered by the Aztec

leader Montezuma, noting that Montezuma "cared no more for discordance in his
f\l

religious underpinnings than Joseph Smith did." Finally, DeVoto defined the Saints

settlement of Utah as essentially militaristic, stating that Brigham Young "understood the

imperative necessity of building up God's kingdom on earth and giving the church

militant an adequate base for its campaign against unrighteousness." Not only

individual leaders but the Church they built were violent down to their foundations.

Both The New York Times and the Chicago Daily Tribune heralded the 1953

publication of Wilderness Passage, an exciting new Western novel set during the Utah

War in the 1850s. The book was set against the backdrop of "the Mormons' War in the

West." During this time of "hatred, suspicion, and violent action," the hero Johnny

Christmas—whose name begs for the character's interpretation as a pop-messiah—is

taken prisoner by a Mormon militia. As the Mormons prepare to resist United States

forces "with war and scorched earth," the hero saves a young polygamous wife from the

184-85.
274.
345.
husband and the life that she hates. Short on nuance and long on action—much like

Zane Grey's classic Westerns populated with villainous Mormons and their female

victims—the novel reinforced the image of nineteenth century Mormon rebellion against

lawful federal authority.70

Another well-reviewed account of the Utah War period returned to the well-worn

topic of the Mountain Meadows massacre. In spite of the publication of Juanita Brooks'

highly respected history of the incident, published in 1950, non-Mormon authors

continued to paint the massacre as an example Mormon fanaticism enacted on innocent

71

emigrants. Further, the act might have been isolated, but writers generally regarded it as

evidence of violent feelings and propensities harbored by all Mormons. Reviewers hailed

Amelia Bean's story of the ill-fated Fancher party as a wonderful retelling of what one

labeled "possibly the most cold-blooded murder of a large group of men, women, and

children [...] in American history." The book and its reviewers acknowledged a history

of "violent and often utterly self-defeating actions by emigrants" passing through Utah
79

territory. But they nevertheless emphasize the "Mormon xenophobia" behind the

attack. One featured character, a Destroying Angel, lived to kill Gentiles as retribution
Wayne Carver, "Honest Story of the Mormons' War in West," rev. of Forrester Blake,
Wilderness Passage (New York: Random House, 1953), Chicago Daily Tribune, August 23, 1953.
70
See also Advertisement, New York Times, August 24, 1953, and Caroline Bancroft, "The Magic
Mountains," New York Times, September 6, 1953.
71
While Brooks' book was not reviewed at the time of its publication by either the Chicago Daily
Tribune or The New York Times—which is surprising, given the regularity with which the Times in
particular reviewed scholarly books—it is evident from occasional references to the book in reviews from
the 1950s onward that it was both known and respected.
72
Paul Engle, "Love and Adventure Deftly Depicted Here," rev. Amelia Bean, The Fancher Train
(New York: Doubleday & Co., 1958), Chicago Daily Tribune, June 1, 1958.
73
Marshall Sprague, "Massacre in Utah," rev. of The Fancher Train (New York: Doubleday &
Co., 1958), New York Times, May 25, 1958.
 198

for the long-ago murder of his wife. Far from turning the other cheek, these Mormons are

portrayed as nurturing a vengeful malice.

While Mormon scoundrels were generally the purview of popular fiction, the

1958 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel dedicated a long section to its gold-seeking pioneer

heroes' adventures during a winter in Salt Lake City, proving that books with literary

value, like their popular counterparts, had never given up the stereotype of Mormon

violence. The Travels ofJaimie McPheeters feels like a twentieth-century homage to

Mark Twain, adopting the folksy language of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and the

itinerary of Roughing It. But while Twain's classic write-up of his own visit to Salt Lake

City informed readers that stories of the Mormons' reputation for violence were wildly

exaggerated, Jaimie McPheeters took those tales to new heights. These Mormons are

dirty and uncouth, superstitious and hypocritical. Brigham Young is a gifted cusser who

exhorts his followers to eschew all modem medicine even as he sneaks to a Gentile

doctor's house under cover of darkness to receive treatment for his own ailments. And

while only a faction within the Mormon community is violent, that faction roams the

territory unchecked "to hunt down and murder all backsliders."74 The leader of this

incarnation of the Danites is particularly loathsome, and especially enjoys the punishment

of recalcitrant women:

Somebody said he seemed to relish it, being uncommonly religious even

for a Mormon, and would grow flushed and sweaty, while shouting prayer
aloud in a kind of frenzy as the naked women twisted and screamed. But

74
330.
 when it was over, he was limp and loose, as if he had really driven the
devil out. Most everybody was afraid of him, he was so religious.75

As the narrator explains, "fanatical worship and orgiastic sex are brothers under
lf\

the skin." Here Mormon superstition and sexual deviance combined to create

decidedly sado-masochistic violence. The Gentile heroes barely escape Salt Lake

City with their lives, leaving it in "the Dark Ages" under the threats of "the long

arm of Sanctimony."77 In spite of convincing and widely-accepted historical

arguments to the contrary, non-Mormon Americans continued to regard the

nineteenth-century Saints as a violent people, and the religion that shaped their

lives—and those of their twentieth-century descendants—as the source of that

violence.

Theocracy: "a 'closed' society surrounded by an open one"78

By the middle of the twentieth century, images of Mormon control could not be

easily separated into distinct categories. Instead, Americans concerned with Church

leaders' power over members showed priestly control over the political, economic, and

social behavior of members as inextricably intertwined. According to mid-twentieth

century assessments, the Mormon hierarchy did not seek one form of control more than

any other, nor did one form of control dominate in practice. Rather, the Church subtly

76
337.
77
345^*6.
Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1964), 5.
influenced its members in every aspect of their lives, increasing the wealth and power of

the institution and its leaders by every available means.

As Americans continued to celebrate their pioneer ancestors, authors attributed

the Mormons' phenomenal success as settlers on the Western frontier to their useful but

anti-democratic cohesion under the leadership of domineering prophets. In The Overland

Trail, Jay Monaghan turned for his overall assessment of the Utah territory in the

nineteenth century to Mark Twain's Roughing It, in which Twain declared Utah to be

"the only absolute monarchy in America."79 Monaghan was not interested in the

peculiarities of Mormon marital practices. Instead he analyzed the Saints' successful

establishment in the desert, which he attributed to Brigham Young's wise if autocratic

leadership. Beginning on the westward trail, according to Monaghan, Young mixed the

political with the spiritual by delivering the days "marching orders" at twice-daily prayer
SO

meetings. But rather than simply coercing obedience from his followers, he kept them

happy by letting them think they were in charge: "He knew the value of giving many
pi

people high-sounding ranks." For good measure, Monaghan reminded readers that the

Mormon community also benefitted from Young's smart exploitation of Gentile

emigrants, as illustrated by a story of Young leaving behind Mormon men at river fords

along the trail to charge Gentile wagon trains a fee to have their parties floated across.

Thus the Mormon settlers flourished under their spiritual leader's able manipulation of

Saints and Gentiles alike regarding the most worldly concerns.

79
Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1947.
80
319.
81
318. Emphasis mine.
 201

While the media generally avoided depicting the Mormons in this way in the

interest of presenting a unified front to the United States' enemies, sometimes they

slipped. In 1948, NBC and the State Department made front-page headlines when the

radio program "Voice of America" aired what some Senators deemed insulting claims

about specific American states. The Mormons were singled out in one broadcast that

described their early decades in the Utah territory: "Brigham Young governed the

Mormons for thirty years with an iron hand, like an absolute emperor." Such an

assessment of early Mormon society might have passed unnoticed by all but the Latter-

day Saints, if not for the fact that the "Voice of America" program was broadcast in

Spanish throughout Latin America. While it might be acceptable to twit the Mormons at

home, such claims were hardly an appropriate means of impressing our neighbors with

the freedom that flourished on American soil.82

Scholarly studies, too, continued to emphasize the Mormons' theocratic roots. In

Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier, prominent historian Ray Allen

Billington began his assessment of Saints by celebrating "[tjheir indomitable energy and

all-prevailing faith."83 But individual fortitude and righteousness did not explain the

Mormons' success. According to Billington, the Saints "were simply wise enough to

adopt an economic system suited to their unique environment." The Mormons succeeded

because rather than acting as self-interested individuals like most pioneer settlers, they

adopted a cooperative economic system in which "the welfare of the social group

82
Samuel A. Tower, "'Voice' Broadcasts Infuriate Senate: Descriptions of States Held 'Lies,'"
New York Times, April 27, 1948.
83
(New York: MacMillan Company, 1949), 549.
transcended the welfare of the individual." Billington argued that the Mormon pioneers

adhered to this system not because they understood the practical necessity of doing so,

but rather simply because Church leaders told them to and Brigham Young had taught

them "to obey orders blindly." And Young did not simply want his community to

survive on the frontier. Rather, he sought to make them economically and politically

independent of the United States.86 In other words, the Saints' amazing success resulted

from their unquestioning obedience to commands founded on their leader's political

ambitions.

Even the story of Brigham Young's most famous wife, Ann Eliza Young, became

a tale not of polygamy but of the oppressive atmosphere of territorial Utah. In The

Twenty-Seventh Wife (1961), Irving Wallace showed more interest in the economic

structure of the Mormon community than in the system of plural marriage that Ann Eliza

Young supposedly dedicated her life to overthrowing. Brigham Young's abuse of Ann

Eliza was not primarily sexual, according to Wallace. Rather, Young was guilty of

neglecting his young wife's basic economic needs to the point that she, in spite of his

wealth, was forced to take in boarders to support herself.87 When Ann Eliza finally

decided to escape her intolerable marriage she sought the help of Gentiles because she

knew that no Mormon would dare assist a woman "in open rebellion" against their

538.
546.
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961).
 203

Prophet for fear of the punishments they might incur.88 When Ann Eliza finally left Salt

Lake City, her journey took her from the "cloistered" Mormon territory of Utah to the

"freer air" of the "spacious" non-Mormon world.89 Compared with the fearful repression

of Brigham Young's kingdom, the Gentile world was "a haven of liberty."90 Wallace

biography demonstrated to American readers that the Utah territory was founded on

Church leaders' total social and economic control of their followers.

The American Heritage History of the Great West, a handsomely illustrated coffee

table volume published in 1965, contrasted the Utah Saints with their San Francisco co-

religionist Sam Brannan, who settled in California on Brigham Young's orders but

abandoned his Church when his gold-inspired ambitions conflicted with the Prophet's

directives. On the overland trail to the Great Salt Lake, the Mormons experienced terrible

deprivation but "held fast, inspirited by the endless prayers, threats, fervors, and

psychological tricks of Brigham Young and the Twelve Apostles."91 Once in territorial

Utah, the "church's iron authority" was absolute, and the "stiff-necked legislature [...]

was little better than an arm of the church."92 Young's power was so great that when he

ordered his flock to stay put in Utah in spite of the promise of wealth in the California

gold fields after 1849, nearly all obeyed. The volume presented Brannan, by comparison,

as an independent-minded capitalist who took advantage of his physical distance from

Young's seat and abandoned the Church to try his luck in the gold fields, eventually
88
28.
89
16.
90
27.
91
David Lavender, with pictorial commentary by Ralph K. Andrist, Editor in charge, Alvin M.
Josephy, Jr. (New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., 1965), 226.
92
262-63.
 204

becoming a wealthy man. While Brannan died in poverty, the book applauded his various

capitalist enterprises as signs of forward thinking industry and individualism while the

backwards Mormons, under the direction of Brigham Young, clung "to the familiar

sturdy yeo-man concept of the first frontier."93

The news media generally referred to the Church leadership's control only

obliquely, putting facts in front of readers with little or no interpretation. The facts the

media highlighted, however, subtly asserted on an undemocratic unity in the Mormon

community that worked to the benefit of Church leaders. When Heber J. Grant died, for

instance, although the papers avoided discussing his polygamous past, The New York

Times emphasized his enormous power as a businessman. In an obituary entitled "Heber

Grant Dies; Mormon Leader, 88: Latter-Day Saints Seventh President, Earned Fortune in

Insurance Business," the writer described the "business sagacity which earned [Grant] a

fortune." Grant owned his own insurance firm and presided over a variety of important

Western business concerns, including the Church's retail company, Zion's Cooperative

Mercantile Institution; the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company; Zion's Savings Bank and Trust

Company and the Utah State National Bank; and the Beneficial Life Insurance Company.

He also, the writer noted, served on the Board of Directors of the Union Pacific

Railroad.94 This list of Grant's business ventures immediately followed an overview of

his Church responsibilities, and the comingling of Church-owned companies with outside

93
251.
94
May 15, 1945.
 205

business interests emphasized to non-Mormons just how extensively the Church

comingled the, to American minds, separate concerns of saving souls and making money.

The potential ramifications of Mormon Church authorities' control over their

followers for non-Mormon America became a pressing interest until the mid-1960s, when

George Romney, the popular governor of Michigan, began to look like a front-runner for

the Republican Party's presidential nomination. The national press had celebrated George

Romney's faith as proof of his solid religious values—when his power was limited to the

state level.95 But when he turned his eyes to the President's office, his religion suddenly

looked ominous. In response to Romney's presidential ambitions, in December 1965 The

New York Times ran a three-part investigation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day

Saints exploring its structure, business interests, and rapid growth. But the real purpose of

the investigation was to warn readers about the Church's influence over its members:

"What is a Mormon? [...] He is two things—a member of a religious denomination, and a

member of one of the most unusual, most tightly knit social organizations in American

life, one that impinges on virtually every facet of his life."96 For non-Mormon Americans,

the influence of the Church in every aspect of its members lives represented an intrusion

of religion into secular affairs that was inappropriate insofar as it was limited to Mormon

individuals; obnoxious as it impacted their non-Mormon neighbors; and would be

See "A Maverick Starts a New Crusade," New York Times, February 28, 1960; "George
Romney: A New Star in Political Skies," Chicago Daily Tribune, February 5, 1962; "An Impatient
Politician: George Wilcken Romney," New York Times, June 8, 1964.
96
Wallace Turner, "Mormons Gain Despite Tensions: Liberals Are Stirred by Church Curb on
Negro Members; Right-Wing Activity and Polygamy Also Cause Concern," December 27, 1965.
 206

dangerous if a Mormon were to take his faith and his Church with him into the Oval

Office.

In the first article, which the Times ran on the front page, reporter Wallace Turner

explicitly connected images of the old pioneer Mormons in their Western Kingdom with

the present-day: the Church "still has much of the vigor, pragmatism, force, resolve, faith,

and determination that Young built into it. It also has an authoritarian control that

emanates from" Salt Lake City. This "great socio-economic-theocratic organization" had

grown rich on the tithes it extracted from its members, which Turner, without citing any

sources, estimated at $125 million annually in the 1960s. It sent thousands of

missionaries around the world every year to recruit new members who would, upon entry

into the fold, be required to sacrifice ten percent of their income and nearly all of their

free time to the organization. And believers dared not deny the Church either their time or

their money, because if they did the Church would forbid them access to the temples that

Mormons believed were the only proper sites for essential religious practices. In short,

the Church held members hostage to their faith, and members would give anything the
07

Church demanded in exchange for the practice of their religion.

The second part of Turner's expose featured a picture of George Romney just

below the headline and explained the Latter-day Saints' official policy of withholding the

priesthood from black men—an issue that was quickly becoming a problem for the

Church in the Civil Rights era. Intertwined with Turner's explanation of the Mormons'

theological racism was a profile of Romney, "the textbook example of the devout
 207

Mormon priest who is successful in business life [...] and later in politics." Not only did

Romney integrate his faith with all other aspects of his life, but this faith apparently

required that he deny blacks the equal rights that the United States government had so

recently guaranteed to them in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And while Mormon

intellectuals support integration, Turner pointed out that the highest Church authorities—

including Romney's cousin, an Apostle—had not eliminated discrimination in the

priesthood. But the biggest question of all is whether a Mormon's theology might

interfere with his actions in the political realm: "Can the Church tell a Mormon priest

what to do in public office?"

The third and final part of Turner's investigation answered this question using the

testimony of former Church members. According to Turner's sources, many ex-Mormons

left the Church because it was anti-intellectual and because, simply put, "this is a hard

religion to live." Local authorities enforced strict restrictions on personal behavior

(including prohibitions on alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea, which had fascinated non-

Mormons since the early twentieth century) and required a ten-percent tithe to the Church

in Salt Lake City and "sizable sums" for local authorities as well. Members had no way

of knowing how the organization spent this money, because "[t]he church long ago

adopted the habit of secrecy about its financial affairs." But worse than the financial

controls were the demands on members' time, as members were expected to dedicate

themselves to unpaid Church jobs without question whenever they were "called." This

98
Turner, "Mormon Stand on Negroes Poses Problem for Romney If He Decides to Run for
President: Church Prejudice Would Be an Issue," December 28, 1965.
 208

rigorous involvement "cuts off independent thinking. The Mormon Church has exploited

this mass participation and cessation of independent thought"—a problem furthered,

Turner asserted, by Church ownership of no fewer than three major Western newspapers

and radio and television stations in Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Idaho.99 In the face of

such a presentation of the evidence, readers could hardly answer Turner's previous

question about whether Church authorities could tell a Mormon politician what to do in

public office with anything other than a resounding "Yes!"

While far less pointed than Turner's analysis, Wallace Stegner's assessment of the

contemporary Saints embodied many of his critiques. In a study of the nineteenth-century

Mormon journey to the Great Salt Lake, Stegner told readers that twentieth-century

Saints exhibited many of the same characteristics as the pioneer ancestors they almost

worshiped. The territorial society that he described as "not a state, not a republic, but a

Kingdom" had given way to "the Intermountain Empire," "a more cohesive society yet

than many Americans know."101 And like Wallace Turner and more vicious critics like

Aldous Huxley, Stegner did not believe this society produced independently minded

people, fully integrated with the rest of America: "They stand facing the rest of the world

like a rather amiable herd of musk oxen, horns out, in a protective ring, watchful but not

belligerent—full of confidence but ready to be reasonable, and wanting to be liked."

Average Mormons, as Stegner described them, did not know much, but they knew they
99
Turner, "Mormon Tithes Support Worldwide Proselyting, and Membership Keeps Growing:
Financial Health of Church Strong," December 29, 1965.
100
Turner carried his message further when he published a greatly expanded version of this
argument in his book The Mormon Establishment (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).
101
4, 299, 300.
 209

were right, and they were willing to like their non-Mormon neighbors in spite of how

misguided they are. For non-Mormon Americans the image of a people so thoroughly

dominated by their Church in their daily affairs—where no religious authority, many

Americans believed had any business dictating to its members—looking down on the rest

of the country was not only laughable, but insulting as well. Non-Mormon Americans

condemned the Saints not only for their persistent intermingling of religion in political,

economic, and social affairs, but also for their conviction that they, and not the rest of

America, were right about the appropriate relationship between church and state.

American Mormons: "men of high moral quality"103

Many aspects of Mormon belief and practice continued to make their Gentile

neighbors uncomfortable. But the fact remained that the Mormons were pioneers beyond

parallel whose remarkable settlement of the intermountain deserts greatly expanded

American territory. The nineteenth-century Saints had also made further expansion

possible by providing a key way station on the trails to the West coast. Finally, they

fostered the settlement of the Western deserts by introducing and perfecting the irrigation

that made expansion of America's population in that region possible even into the mid-

twentieth century. Even more, they accomplished these remarkable feats in a spirit of

faith and unity that Gentile Americans could envy—as long as they did not examine it too

closely. And just as Mormon pioneers could be celebrated for opening up the West to

Carl Carmer, "The 'Peculiar People' Prosper," New York Times, April 15, 1962.
 210

American expansion, the missionaries and public servants among their twentieth-century

descendants were carrying American ideals abroad into the world.

While Bernard DeVoto was no fan of Joseph Smith or of Mormon theology, in

1943 he published a book identifying 1846 as the first major year of American Manifest

Destiny. Among other major pioneer figures, he hailed the achievements of Brigham

Young and his followers in settling the vast frontier.104 The Year of Decision: 1846

received plaudits from critics and reached a wide audience as a Book-of-the-Month-Club

selection. The picture it painted of Brigham Young and the Mormons was laudatory to

say the least. According to one reviewer, the most remarkable aspect of DeVoto's history

was "the readjustment of time's judgment of the Mormons." Despite their faults, DeVoto

concluded, the Mormons did not deserve the brutal treatment they received at the hands

of so many American neighbors, finally ending with the expulsion from Nauvoo that

drove them West. Their leader, Brigham Young, too, deserved America's respect, for his

role as "one of the finders and makers of the West."105

In a much quieter way, John Ford's classic Western film Wagon Master did the

same for the Saints.106 The movie begins with a pair of Mormon elders entering a dusty

frontier town to hire guides who can take their party into the uncharted deserts of

southern Utah. They fall in with a pair of young horse traders who, like the Mormons, are

part of a class of people who are needed for their skills but not respected by the majority

104
Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision: 1846 (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1943).
105
Fanny Butcher, "DeVoto Pens a Gripping Story of Pioneers' Trek to the West," rev., Chicago
Daily Tribune, March 28, 1943.
106
USA: RKO Pictures, 1950.
 211

of settlers. These are average workaday Mormons: there are no polygamous wives, and

the most valuable goods they carry are the seeds they will plant as soon as they choose a

spot for their new settlement. A few are self-righteous and occasionally mean, but most

are warm, pious, good-natured people who cuss when they are angry, pray when they

need help, and share what little they have with whomever they encounter. After sharing

the dangers and privations of the trail, including thirst, sickness, Indians, and outlaws, the

young horse traders lead the party of Saints to the right place, and stick around to help

their new friends create a home. The final scenes imply that one of the young Gentile

horse traders intends to marry a Mormon elder's daughter. In the end, Ford's Mormons

are simply part of the story of "a bunch of people going west."107

John D. Fitzgerald's family memoir Papa Married a Mormon (1955) presented a

similar picture of Mormon-Gentile cooperation on the edges of civilization in southern

Utah. In sharp contrast to Samuel Woolley Taylor's memoir of a thoroughly Mormon

family's struggles against the incursion of Gentile America in the early twentieth century,

Fitzgerald told the story of his Roman Catholic father and Mormon mother who raised an

interreligious family on the border between a Mormon town and mining camp in the late

nineteenth century. When his father first arrived in Utah, Fitzgerald recounted, he

determined to "judge men by the contribution they made to science, culture, social and

economic progress, tolerance, patriotism, spiritual leadership, and their regard for the

Peter Bogdanovich, commentary to the DVD, Wagon Master (USA: Warner Home Video,
2009).
 212

I OR

well-being of their fellow-men." By all of these measures, Fitzgerald's Papa found his

Mormon neighbors to be respectable men and women. While he initially wondered at

some of the Saints' peculiar beliefs and worried whether he ought to associate with them,

he reflected that every religion undergoes a "baptism of ridicule and persecution" before

it achieves wider acceptance and decides that one false tenet does not a false religion

make.109 This realization allowed him to fall in love with and marry a good Mormon girl,

and later to send his children to Mormon Sunday schools and have them baptized as

Latter-day Saints in the absence of a Catholic church. When the children were old

enough, their parents allowed them to choose their own faith: one followed his mother

into Mormonism, completed a mission, and married the local bishop's daughter; the other

three embraced their father's Catholic faith. But this interfaith understanding extended

well beyond the Fitzgerald household: when Papa died, because there was no Roman

Catholic church in the area the Mormon bishop had a Catholic altar installed in the local

Mormon tabernacle. A Roman Catholic priest presided at a funeral where a Mormon

choir performed the mass to a gathering of mourners of all faiths. According to

Fitzgerald's recollections, even in the strictest days of the Mormon kingdom the Saints

treated in kind anyone who settled among them ready to be good neighbors and good

friends.

Plentiful histories of the westward expansion of the United States avoided

controversial subjects to cast the Mormons as real American heroes rather than villainous

108
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1955), 51.
 213

scoundrels. Men to Match My Mountains (1956) described the Mormon pioneers using

many of the same terms employed ten years earlier by Ray Allen Billington. But in spite

of the Saints' "unquestioning obedience" of authority, they thrived because of their

"rugged individualism." And while they were cooperated in their endeavors they were

not communists: they financed their settlements with private capital.110 Similarly, the

American Heritage Series volume Westward on the Oregon Trail cast the Mormons as "a

religious sect seeking a haven from persecution and mob violence."111 The volume,

designed for young readers, celebrated the Mormon settlers' ingenuity in creating an

odometer that measured the first wagon train's progress on the trail as well as in

establishing the irrigation system that allowed the Saints to thrive in the desert. And in

direct contrast to writers like Monaghan, who smirked at the Saints' exploitation of

Gentile travelers, this history claimed that the Gentiles offered to pay for safe passage

across rivers where the Mormons had established ferries. The section on the Mormon

settlers closes with the words of Brigham Young: "we have fulfilled the mission... [sic]

by soliciting and pointing out to you a beautiful site for this city, which is destined to be a

refuge for the oppressed, and one that is calculated to please the eye, to cheer the heart,

and fill the hungry soul with food."112 The author did not explain that Young intended the

new city to be a refuge specifically for oppressed Mormons, instead leaving the reader

with the impression that the Mormons were building a refuge for all. Such writers looked

110
Irving Stone, Men to Match My Mountains: The Opening of the Far West, 1840-1900 (Garden
City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1956), 97.
111
Marian T. Place (New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., 1962), 110. For a similar
treatment, see Franklin Folsom, Famous Pioneers (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Harvey House, 1963).
 214

at the same facts as Billington and came to completely different—but still unbalanced—

conclusions about the Saints.

Edwin Gaustad's 1966 A Religious History of America exemplifies the sort of

tender admiration with which many observers imagined the Saintly pioneers in this

period. Gaustad dedicated only two gentle pages to Mormon history, in which he

exhibited a marked fondness for the underdog Saints. Like many others, Gaustad deeply

admired Mormon prosperity in the deserts of the intermountain West, noting in a phrase

that by this time had become cliched in histories of the Saints that they made the desert

bloom like the rose. Remarkably, he attributed their success to "careful organization and

clear authority." But, in sharp contrast to authors who painted the mass of Mormons as

mindless sheep, Gaustad noted that the Mormon prophets exercised authority with the

full consent of those governed: "Authority implies consent; once given, that authority can

endow a tender embryonic community with discipline, determination, and perseverance."

In the midst of the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, Gaustad admired that "Mormonism

managed to resist the more disastrous temptations of western individualism and maverick

disorder." The people were industrious and self-sufficient, even in the face of great and

terrible odds. The Church hierarchy was a protective institution that nurtured and

protected its community, thus enabling the Saints to achieve amazing things in their
i n

desert home.

113
(New York: Harper & Row, 1966),136—38. Gaustad's friendliness is not lost on the Church,
which currently recommends his book as a supplementary text for the study of Church history "Primary 5:
Doctrine and Covenants: Church History," The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
http://www.lds.org. Accessed March 21,2011.
 215

Immediately after World War II, Americans admired many mid-twentieth century

Mormon achievements as much as they did those of the Saints' pioneer ancestors.

Although they avoided discussions of unique aspects of Mormon theology, members of

other faiths willingly gathered together to celebrate the Saints on special occasions. When

Heber J. Grant Protestant and Catholic clergy joined local and state officials from Utah

and beyond to mourn the Prophet alongside his followers.114 A year later, The New York

Times declared the Book of Mormon one of the most influential books in American

history.115 And shortly thereafter the national media heralded the Church's announcement

that membership was nearing the one million mark.116 In each case the Mormons were

treated as respected members of the American community, and neither their growth nor

their unique beliefs were denigrated.

In 1947, admiration for the Mormon pioneers collided with respect for the growth

and modernization of their Desert Empire as the state of Utah celebrated the centennial of

the first Mormon settlement. The nation memorialized the event with a new three-cent

stamp featuring a covered wagon cresting the rim of the mountains surrounding the Salt

Lake Valley, with a man looking out over the plains underneath Brigham Young's

reputed words on first seeing the valley: "This is the place."117 At the same time, the

national news media followed a group of descendants of the original Mormon pioneers

retracing their ancestors' route from Nauvoo to Salt Lake City. But in a celebration of the
114
"Mormon Associates Honor Heber Grant," New York Times, May 19, 1945.
115
"Mormons Near Million: Church Almost Reaches Year's Membership Goal," New York Times,
April 5, 1947.
116
"Mormons to Relive Historic 1846 Trek," New York Times, May 1, 1947.
117
Kent B. Stiles, "News of the World Stamps: 3-Cent Issue Memorializes Settlement of Utah by
Mormons in 1847," New York Times, June 22, 1947.
 216

nation's new infrastructure, these new pioneers followed the Mormon Trail in

automobiles topped with makeshift wagon covers. Readers could chart the progress of the

twentieth-century emigrants as their comfortable, modem vehicles took them across the

country in a few days instead of the months it took the early pioneers. Finally, on July 24,

1947, the actual centennial of the first Mormon party's arrival in the Salt Lake Valley,

state officials unveiled a monument to those emigrants at the reputed site of Brigham

Young's famous pronouncement. The New York Times called the occasion not Utah's

Day, but Mormonism's.

Desert Empire, a 1948 film reel produced by the Desert and Rio Grande Western

Railroad, perfectly illustrates this blending of nostalgia for the pioneers and admirations

for the modernization of their settlement. The film promoted two separate arms of the

railroad's business in Utah: tourism and the mining industry. The film began with a

dedication to the pioneers who founded Utah and proceeded to explore Utah's natural

wonders, marvel at its modern industries, and finally celebrate the amenities available in

its cities for the modem traveler. In Salt Lake City, "the throne of the Desert Empire," the

narrator described images of the Eagle Gate to Brigham Young's estate and the Pioneer

Monument surmounted by a bronze of Young himself. Finally, the cameras followed

along as fashionably dressed men and women visited Temple Square and toured the

Tabernacle.119 The film ended with the recently deceased Prophet, Heber J. Grant,

"Monument Dedicated on Mormonism's Day," New York Times, July 25, 1947.
119
Carlton T. Sills, dir. Desert Empire (USA: New Universal Pictures Commercial Department,
1948).
welcoming visitors to Utah and heralding its pioneer history, its natural beauties, and its

myriad contributions to the United States and the world.

As the Cold War heated up in the late 1940s, the Mormons became players in the

international conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States when Czech

authorities arrested two Mormon missionaries, accusing them of entering an area of the

country that was off-limits to foreign travelers. The arrests sparked a flurry of protests

from the United States government and American news media, who repeatedly declared

their support for the "United States Mormon missionaries" and the "American Mormon

Church." In short order the Czechs expelled all Mormon missionaries, ending with the

two young men whose arrest had sparked the controversy. When they finally returned to

U.S. soil, both the Chicago Daily Tribune and The New York Times heralded them as

heroes and the Times published extended interviews with them about their recent

experiences in the Soviet bloc. In the face of the ideological conflict at the heart of the

Cold War, American Mormons were heralded for their role on the front lines of the

worldwide fight against Communism.121

The culminating event of such one-sided celebrations of Mormon cultural

contributions to the nation occurred on June 1, 1950, when a sculpture of Brigham Young

was installed in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. The marble figure of

120
"Two U.S. Mormons Ousted by Czechs: Missionaries, in Prison Four Weeks, Expelled by
Police—Priests Are Sentenced," New York Times, February 25, 1950, and "Czechs Oust Head of U.S.
Relief Unit," New York Times, January 12, 1950.
121
"Czechs Oust 11 Mormons," New York Times, November 17, 1949; "2 Mormons Missing in
Czechoslovakia," New York Times, February 9, 1950; "Ousted Mormons Here from Europe: 'We'll Meet
Again When Red Star Is Over America,' One Says Czech Police Boasted," New York Times, May 8, 1950;
"Soviets Call Missionaries Spies," New York Times, June 14, 1951.
 218

Utah's first governor was carved by his grandson and unveiled by his daughter in the

presence of Church President George A. Smith. Perhaps most astonishing, given the

angry denunciations of editorial writers just two generations before at the thought of Utah

sending a statue of Young to the Capitol, was the drapery that covered the sculpture prior

to its unveiling: the American flag. In some circles Young had been so thoroughly

separated from his religion's most controversial beliefs and practices that the man once

denounced as a traitor to the United States was cited because "he gave his all so this
1 -yy

nation might persist."

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir carried American values abroad on a sweeping

tour of major European cities in 1955. During a trip that included Scotland, England,

Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, and France, American observers were most interested in

the choir's Berlin appearances. Traveling on a special permit from the Soviet authorities,

the choir journeyed through occupied East Germany to perform for members of the

American military stationed in West Berlin. But by far the most moving event, according
1 T\

to American newspapers, was a special free concert for East German refugees. Here

the Mormons not only served to spread the American message to the world, but also to

comfort those dispossessed by America's enemies.

The Choir performed from home in 1962 for an international audience as part of a

demonstration of the United States' technological and ideological superiority. Several

122
"A Tribute to Mormon Leader," New York Times, June 2, 1950.
123
See "Londoners Get a Shock from Utah Mormons," Chicago Daily Tribune, August 24, 1955;
"Audience in Berlin Hails Mormon Choir," New York Times, September 7, 1955; "Airmen Hear
Mormons," New York Times, September 9, 1955.
 219

American broadcasters sent several hours of programming around the globe via satellite,

illustrating American life to the nation's friends and enemies abroad. Programming

included a press conference with President John F. Kennedy, scenes of the United

Nations building and other skyscrapers in New York City, a Chicago Cubs baseball

game, Indians on the Western plains, and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. But

according to the Chicago Daily Tribune, "[t]he climax was the Mormon Tabernacle

Choir from Salt Lake City, singing 'A Might Fortress Is Our God' [...] The choir was at

Mt. Rushmore, S.D. While it sang, the cameras swept the stone faces[.]"124 Both the

Tribune and The New York Times featured pictures of the choir arrayed in front of the

national memorial, displaying the nation's talent, faith, and patriotism for all the world to

see as they performed a classic American Protestant hymn in front of one of the nation's

most celebrated landmarks.125

Numerous studies of Mormonism promoted this version of the Saints with zeal,

glossing over differences to emphasize what the Mormons had in common with the rest

of Americans. In Strange Sects and Curious Cults (1961), for example, Marcus Bach

examined a number of religious groups regarded as fringe by many Americans. But rather

than mocking these groups for their strangeness or warning readers about the dangers

such religions posed, Bach instead described the best and brightest that each had to offer.

He especially praised the Mormons for their "resourcefulness" and "zeal."126 Citing as his

124
"Telstar Bridges Sea for Millions in U.S., Europe," Chicago Daily Tribune, July 24, 1962.
125
"Telstar Program Hailed in Europe: 18-Nation Audience Placed at 100,000,000 Persons," New
York Times, July 24, 1962.
126
260-61.
 220

primary source a group of Mormons with whom he drove from Nauvoo to Salt Lake City,

Bach explained that Mormon religious practices were perfectly rational and respectable:

"no rolling in the dust, no altar call, no fanatical exhibitionism, no talk of hell and lakes

of fire."127 Bach either ignored major criticisms of the Saints or dismissed them as the

hopelessly biased accusations of avowed enemies of the community. His Mormons

demonstrated "an exceptionally high morality, a practical social consciousness, and a

church program which puts religion at the very center of the personal life." Focused on

promoting the Mormons' place as valued members of the American community, Bach

did not bother to disprove dominant American misperceptions but rather simply

dismissed them out of hand. Once again an author presented an extremely one-sided

portrait of the Mormons that only engaged with those aspects of the faith and the

community that the author wanted to promote.

The New York Times published an article an article in 1962 with just as

misleading a title. But like Bach's examination of the Mormons, Carl Carmer's "The

'Peculiar People' Prosper" was more love letter than expose. While Carmer did briefly

review early Church history and contemporary beliefs, he spent far more time

emphasizing the Saints' value as good citizens. He praised their tradition of service to the

nation in the twentieth century, noting that Mormon public servants such as Ezra Taft

Benson, Secretary of Agriculture under President Eisenhower, and George Romney, then

Governor of Michigan, "have made themselves a reputation for honesty and integrity."

127
258.
128
(Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1961), 265.
 221

Mormon life, he said, is filled with love of country and an admirable faith characteristic

of an earlier time in the nation's history. He described entering Utah as "miraculously

entered a period similar in its moral and spiritual overtones to that of America as a whole

in the nineteenth century, when the churches satisfied more than their declared function

with church suppers, Wednesday night prayer meetings, Sunday School picnics and

evangelistic revivals." Just as their pioneer ancestors set us the example for thrift, hard

work, and ingenuity, the modem Saints were leading examples of piety and patriotism in

the twentieth century.129 Like Gaustad, in the face of the rapid change and numerous

challenges that confronted the United States in the 1960s, Carmer praised the Mormons

as a rock of stable, old-fashioned social and political values.

The last word in this period seemed to belong to Robert Mullen, whose history of

the Mormons emphasized all of the values that Americans prized in their peculiar

Western brethren. He gave a brief overview of the Saints' early history and contemporary

beliefs, describing Joseph Smith as a religious innovator ahead of his time and the

Mormons of the current day as holding beliefs remarkably similar to the bulk of
• 1 ^0

American Christians: they were, he declared, "the essence of America." And they carry

this essence abroad, as he explained at length in over two hundred pages dedicated to

describing the Mormons' missions to all parts of the world. Their phenomenal growth, he

explains to readers, benefited the United States, because the values that the Mormons

taught are values that all Americans recognized and cherished. But in the last chapters of
129
April 15, 1962.
The Latter-day Saints: The Mormons Yesterday and Today (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1966), 11.
 222

the book, it became clear that Mullen's work was precipitated by more than simple

interest in his subject. Having already revealed that he once worked for the Church

promoting the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's 1955 European tour, Mullen's laudatory tone

seemed understandable if not suspect. But when he ended with an explanatory defense of

the Church's business practices, it was clear that his book was designed as a refutation of

Wallace Turner's damning critique of "the Mormon church, its operation and

expansion." In fact, Mullen's work signaled the resurgence of older patterns of public

discord. The Saints were once again cast in all media as one or the other of a group of

diametrically opposed simplistic stereotypes. Non-Mormons viewed them either as

people who inappropriately allowed their strange religion and their Church leaders to

dominate every aspect of their lives, or as valiant pioneers and devoted patriots whose

faith, if mentioned it all, was acknowledged as little more than inspiringly simple piety.

The Mormons were seldom represented as complicated people who faith and culture was

a mix of qualities that their observers considered both good and bad. As the United States

moved toward the clashes between conservatives and liberals that characterized

American culture in the late-twentieth century, the brief period of an America publicly

defined by the cooperation and mutual respect of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and

Mormons was over.

1
See note 100.
 223

Chapter 5

"A Firm and Immoveable Faith"1,1966-1993

The political and cultural foment that swept the United States in the 1960s had an

indelible impact not so much on the Mormons themselves as on the wider public's

perception of them. As historian Jan Shipps has noted, "clean-cut Mormons" served as a

welcome alternative to counterculture revolutionaries and "scruffy hippies" as the image

'y

of middle America during the 1960s and '70s. But the changes wrought by the African

American Civil Rights movement and second-wave feminism during this period finally

caught up with the Saints. The Mormons themselves stood firm on their values, retaining

their mostly white, mostly middle-class, and largely conservative image in the face of

increasing equality of the races and sexes and the revolution in sexual norms that

liberalized American society in the late-twentieth century.3 In the wake of the increased

attention to negative stereotypes that began in the mid-1960s, the growing divide between

liberal and conservative factions in American culture caused a parallel split in the most

positive representations of the American Mormons. During this period the Mormon
1
Jerry Klein, "Nauvoo, the Town the Mormons Left," New York Times, August 19, 1979. Unless
otherwise noted, all newspaper citations in this chapter are from the Proquest Historical Newspaper
Database. Accessed via the Boston University Libraries, online at http://www.bu.edu/1ibraries.
2
"Surveying the Mormon Image Since 1960," Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years
among the Mormons (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 100.
3
In The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation, sociologist Armand
Mauss argued that as much of American culture liberalized in the 1960s and '70s, the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints went the other direction. Reacting against this liberalizing trend and against its
own perception of a loss of Mormon identity in the face of successful assimilation with American culture in
the preceding decades, the Church entered a phase Mauss labeled retrenchment. Church leaders emphasized
unique Mormon doctrines and enforced strict conservatism and obedience to Church authorities, taking the
Mormon community in the opposite direction from the increasing liberalization of American culture
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994). This period of Mormon retrenchment parallels the backlash
amongst other conservative religious groups in the United States that found voice in political movements
like Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and spurred the increasing division between conservatives and liberals
in the United States that scholars have labeled the "culture wars."
 224

image was batted back and forth like a tennis ball: the conservative movement driven by

evangelical Christians praised the Mormons' social and political conservatism while

condemning their religion as un-Christian; liberals respected the Mormons' right to

believe in whatever prophets and angels they saw fit, but not to control their members in

the bedroom or at the ballot box. And so the Mormons served as both poster-child and

whipping-boy for both sides in the culture wars.

While American interest in the Latter-day Saints did not flag during this period,

for a variety of reasons the number of individual stories told about the Mormons

decreased. First and foremost, technological changes made it easier to spread information

more quickly to more people, and thus sensational local stories became national news.

The consolidation of various media also helped guarantee that stories that did well in one

format would make their way into others: news that grabbed readers' and viewers'

interest quickly reappeared in true-crime books, as well as providing plot-lines for novels,

made-for-television movies, and even big-budget Hollywood films. With every

permutation, writers reworked the stories to make their own point about the Mormons.

Thus the story of a single Mormon murderer could serve to raise Americans' awareness

of the ongoing practice of polygamy, to warn them of the violence supposedly inherent in

Mormonism, and to prove that the Church leadership continued to maintain its

authoritarian rule over members and over the intermountain West. Despite fewer

storylines, the sheer volume of material on the Mormons did not abate in the late

twentieth century; rather, individual stories were repeatedly recycled with different

emphases.
 225

Religion: "anachronistic"

During this period, observers were far less interested in the reality of Joseph

Smith's prophetic experiences than in the ongoing real-world impact of the theology he

had developed. Rather than debating Smith's real status—prophet? fool? liar? mad

man?—many contemporary Americans focused on his stance and the stance of his

Church on blacks, women, and average members of the Mormon community. Thus the

national media continued to discuss the issue of the exclusion of African-Americans from

the priesthood prominently raised by Wallace Turner in his New York Times investigation

of the Latter-day Saints in 1965, and black activists took up the subject in protests across

the country. As the feminist movement gained steam and national debate over the

proposed Equal Rights Amendment dominated the headlines, the separate-but-equal role

assigned to women in Mormon theology also dominated national discussions of the

Saints. And while socially progressive Americans debated the supposed human cost of

Mormon theology in terms of individual equality, religious conservatives (who became

less and less distinguishable from social and political conservatives during this period)

counted the cost of the Mormon heresy by the number of souls supposedly lost to false

doctrine. As the American public fought over the appropriate height of Thomas

Jefferson's wall between church and state, the potential impact of Mormon theology on

average Americans was more widely discussed and debated than it had been since the

battles over polygamy ended in the early twentieth century.

4
Edward B. Fiske, "Mormons: Still No Place in the Pulpit for Blacks," New York Times,
November 23, 1969.
 226

In the late 1960s, George Romney's presidential campaign kept the Mormon

"Negro problem" in the national headlines. The New York Times, in particular, frequently

raised the issue in its coverage of presidential politics leading up to the 1968 election. But

even after Romney withdrew from the race, his Church's ban on blacks in their

priesthood remained in the public eye. External opposition to the Mormons' exclusion of

blacks from the priesthood included active demonstrations by African American

individuals and groups. As early as 1963 the NAACP organized protests at Church

headquarters in Salt Lake City, and in 1965 they threatened to call on member countries

of the United Nations to ban Mormon missionaries because of the Church's racist

policies.5 But in the late 1960s the protests began to hit at the heart of American culture:

college athletes across the country began refusing to participate in competitions that

included Brigham Young University. While only a small number of athletes participated,

they garnered national attention. In 1969, the University of Wyoming sparked

controversy when it dismissed fourteen football players who wrote an open letter

criticizing Brigham Young University and wore black armbands to a meeting with the

coach about their concerns regarding an upcoming game against the Mormon school.6

The same year, black student activists asked the Western Athletic Conference to suspend

BYU, arguing that "we must not and cannot morally justify any continuance of

5
"Mormon Stand Discussed," New York Times, October 6, 1963, and "Mormon Ban Sought,"
New York Times, July 2, 1965.
6
See Anthony Ripley, "Negro Athletes Spark Uproar at U. of Wyoming: Black Armbands Cause
the Dismissal of 14 Players, Moderate Protest Stirs Strong Reaction among Alumni," New York Times,
November 1, 1969.
 227

relationship" with the Mormon university because of the Church's racist policies.7 In

1969, San Jose State College, the University of Arizona, and Stanford University

canceled future sporting events against BYU citing the Church's racial policies.8 And in

1970, extensive protests at the University of Washington, sparked in part by student

demands that the school sever its athletic ties to BYU, caused an uproar on campus and in

national headlines.9

The Mormon leadership did not cow to the pressure, however, reaffirming that

their priesthood policies came from God and therefore could not to be changed merely to

please the public.10 In fact, Mormon leaders flouted public opinion, declaring that the

Church's policy withholding the priesthood from blacks was nobody's business but their

own: "if they feel we have no priesthood, they should have no concern with any aspect of

our theology on priesthood so long as that theology does not deny any man his

constitutional rights."11 Thus they practically invited anyone who thought Church policy

denied equal rights to blacks to scrutinize the theology undergirding the priesthood.

Wallace Turner was at the head of the pack, having already attacked the Book of

Abraham, a revealed Mormon scripture that relates a story of the biblical figure

Abraham's wanderings in Canaan and Egypt, and which is the text most frequently cited

as the source of the Saints' exclusion of blacks from the priesthood. Turner published an

7
Anthony Ripley, "Athletic Conference Is Asked to Expel Brigham Young U.," New York Times,
November 5, 1969.
8
"Head of One College Assails Another: Brigham Young Chief Says Stanford Offends
Mormons," New York Times, December 24, 1969.
9
The story made the front page of the New York Times in William K. Stevens, "Student Activists
Turn from Campus to Society," March 9, 1970.
10
See Fiske, "Mormons: Still No Place in the Pulpit for Blacks," and Wallace Turner, "Mormons
Reaffirm Curb on Negroes," New York Times, January 9, 1970.
11
Turner, "Mormons Reaffirm Curb on Negroes."
 228

article in 1968 on the Egyptian papyri that Joseph Smith had consulted to produce that

scripture. Noting that Mormons believed, based on this text, that the Egyptian pharaohs

were of African descent and were denied the priesthood because of their race, Turner

argued that the recent reexamination of the documents by qualified experts proved that

the Book of Abraham was not a direct translation of the papyri. In fact, he argued,

Smith's text bore no relation whatsoever to the contents of the papyri in question.

Ignoring the fact that Mormons themselves, believing that Smith had been divinely

inspired while completing the Book of Abraham, did not regard the text's origins as a

matter of simple translation, Turner declared that if the book was not a direct translation
1 ~)

of the papyri then it was simply a "pure fabrication." Two years later Turner returned to

the theme, quoting the official historian of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of

Latter-day Saints—the group that had followed Joseph Smith's son rather than Brigham

Young in the mid-nineteenth century—that the book was "simply the product of Joseph

Smith Jr.'s imagination."13 Turner argued in both cases that the Church's had no excuse

for its ongoing exclusion of African Americans from the priesthood. He did not

acknowledge the Mormons' claims to divine inspiration as sufficient support for policies

with real-world consequences.

In addition to reexamining Mormon scriptural justifications for their priesthood

policies, the media turned to the beliefs undergirding all Mormon doctrine: ongoing

revelation and the role of the Prophet, Seer, and Revelator as head of the Church. Several

12
"Papyri Spur Mormon Debate over Basis for Discrimination against Negroes," New York Times,
July 15, 1968.
13
"Mormons' Book of Abraham Called Product of Imagination," New York Times, May 3, 1970.
 229

Church Presidents died in the 1970s, and their obituaries and profiles of their successors

offered the perfect opportunity to explain to the American public what, exactly, the

Mormons believed about revelation. The New York Times' front-page obituary of Joseph

Fielding Smith explained in the Prophet's own words that blacks could not hold the

priesthood because "God decided it."14 Introducing President Spencer Woolley Kimball

in 1974, the Times reminded readers that "As the new President, it is said, Mr. Kimball

can receive communications from God."15 The paper never openly derided the Mormon

belief in ongoing revelation. It did, however, cite the fact that "a high proportion of

Mormons claims to have had some direct experience with revelation" as one reason for

the survival of such an "anachronistic" and "autocratic" institution in the modem United

States.16 Only people foolish enough to believe they talked to God, it implied, would

support such an anti-modem, authoritarian institution. When Church leaders announced

in 1978 that they were opening up the priesthood to "every faithful, worthy man in the

church," the paper acknowledged the Mormons' claim that the new policy came in a

revelation but also labeled the change "the product of a series of interactions among the

highest authorities of the church." "The process," it noted, "is concealed from the

public."17 As one scholar noted, "a revelation was the only way out, and many students of

"Joseph F. Smith of Mormons Dies: Leader of 3 Million Was 95—He Traced His Lineage to
Church's Founder," New York Times, July 3, 1972.
15
Eleanor Blau, "New Mormon Head: Spencer Woolley Kimball," New York Times, January 1,
1974.
16
Fiske, "Mormons: Still No Place in the Pulpit for Blacks."
17
Kenneth A. Briggs, "Mormon Church Strikes Down Ban against Blacks in Priesthood: Change
in 148-Year-Old Policy Was a Result of a 'Revelation,' Letter to Leaders Says," New York Times, June 10,
1978.
 230

Mormonism were puzzled only at the lateness of the hour."18 As with Wilford

Woodruffs Manifesto ending polygamy nearly ninety years before, the American public

tended to view this change as the result of Mormon political expediency rather than a

genuine belief in divine guidance.

But while revelation relieved the Church of the ongoing condemnation of its

unpopular policies on race, Mormons did not change their unpopular stance on feminist

issues, nor did they seem to see any need to do so. Rather, the Saints continued—often

heatedly—to affirm the separate-but-equal role that Mormonism assigned to women both

in the Church and in the home. As many Americans—male and female—embraced at

least in principle the equality of the sexes, the Mormons determinedly adhered to a set of

family values that looked as outdated as reruns of Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows

Best to many Americans. As a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in the

1970s, former Secretary of State Ezra Taft Benson frequently spoke out on the question

of women's liberation. The national media reported his unequivocal stance on behalf of

the Church: the Devil, he said, was "anxiously working to displace the father as the head

of the home." Further, working mothers (alongside inattentive fathers) were to blame for

increases in divorce and rebellion among children.19 And, the media reported, Mormon

women heeded the Church's warnings, turning out in droves in the late 1970s and early

1980s to urge legislators across the United States not to ratify the proposed Equal Rights

Amendment. As one Mormon housewife declared, women were made to be wives and

18
Mario S. DePillis, "Mormons Get Revelations Often, But Not Like This," New York Times, June
11, 1978.
19
"Notes on People: Carey's View Differs on Teen-Age Affairs," New York Times, August 13,
1975.
 231

mothers: "A woman shouldn't try to take over men's jobs [....] To do it a woman would

have to take on masculine traits. Women are not meant to take top jobs."20 The only

major Mormon concession to feminism that the media reported was symbolic: in 1990,

the Church announced changes to the temple endowment ceremony. While the Church

did not provide details, sources told The New York Times that women would no longer be

required to take an oath of obedience to their husbands. Regardless of what went on in

the temple, many Americans believed that out in the real world, contrary to the American

commitment to equality, Mormon women were uniformly the subjects of their husbands

and their Church.

Independent filmmaker Ross McElwee shared his encounter with just such a

Mormon woman in his critically-acclaimed documentary Sherman's March, filmed in

1981 and released in 1986. In the midst of his adventures along the route of Sherman's

March through the South during the Civil War, McElwee spent time with a young

Mormon in Charleston, South Carolina. But he did not seem offended or especially

disturbed by DeeDee's desire to marry a "a priesthood holder." He seemed more

befuddled than anything else by her beliefs, and expressed much more interest in how the

principles of her faith set her apart from the consumer habits of her fellow Americans:

"You don't drink coffee or Coke or beer or anything? How do you live in the twentieth

century?" In particular, McElwee was impressed with her family's preparations,

including the Church-recommended storage of a one year supply of dehydrated food, for

20
Joan Cook, "She Takes a Stand against Liberation," New York Times, September 28, 1970.
21
Peter Steinfels, "Mormons Drop Rites Opposed to Women: Shift on Veil-Wearing and the
Promise to Obey the Husband," New York Times, May 3, 1990.
 232

the conflicts they believed would characterize the imminent beginning of the millennium.

Her "dowry," he noted in a brief soliloquy, "apparently includes a better-than-average

•yy

chance of survival in case of a nuclear attack." Ideals of human equality aside,

Mormonism struck this young American as simply weird.

Stripped of potential political implications, many of the Saints' beliefs were

treated as some combination of comedy and spectacle. When the Mormons completed the

temple on the outskirts of Washington, DC, in 1974, for example, the national press had a

field day with its appearance. One New York Times reporter noted both the "almost

Disneyland-like form of the temple itself," as well as the most un-sacred "tourist

atmosphere" that pervaded the open-house for non-Mormons before the temple's official

dedication. The building, like the religion it represents, "has great pretensions but is at

bottom rather empty."23 A decade later it was simply a joke, as the Times reported to the

nation that someone, apparently noticing the temple's similarity in appearance to the

Emerald City of Oz, had spray-painted a message on an overpass on the highway just

where the temple came into view: "Surrender, Dorothy." The joke carried sinister

overtones, as the graffiti artist did not simply associate the temple with the fantasy land of

Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South in an Era of
Nuclear Weapons Proliferation (USA, 1986). The final quote in this paragraph is the only statement the
New York Times review of the film makes about DeeDee and her Mormon family. See Vincent Canby,
"Film: A Documentary, 'Sherman's March,'" September 5, 1986.
The Mormon practice of storing food as a preparation against any form of disaster—earthly or
divine—drew occasional notice from the press in the 1970s and early 1980s. The coverage was usually
fairly dry, however, and highlighted not only the theological underpinnings of the practice but also the
purely practical reasons for food storage amid the fears of nuclear conflict in the Cold War era. See, for
example, "Mormons among Religious Groups Storing Food," New York Times, May 5, 1974.
23
Paul Goldberger, "New Mormon Temple: $15-million Conversation Piece," November 12,
1974.
 233

Oz, but with its most evil resident the Wicked Witch of the West.24 The pageant at

Palmyra, too, with a script re-written by popular science-fiction author (and Mormon)

Orson Scott Card drew mockery. In a profile that included the subtitle "Scripture Meets

Star Wars," the writer described God's voice booming impressively across the landscape,

only to be succeeded by a sound reminiscent of Alvin and the Chipmunks as the tape was

rewound with the sound system on. Like their architecture, the Mormons' recreations of

their own history were as comic as they were impressive.25

All this silliness was not always funny. As American fears about religious cults

that supposedly brainwashed and abused followers flared in the late 1970s, the Mormons

were routinely mentioned in reports on diverse groups like the Hare Krishnas, the

Moonies, and Jim Jones' People's Temple. The last association was especially damning

after Jones convinced and coerced hundreds of followers to commit mass suicide in 1978.

A report on the tragedy explicitly connected the recent violent fanaticism at Jonestown to

its "precedents," warning readers that "[tjhose who do not remember the past are doomed

to repeat it." In a large illustration above the headline, Jim Jones himself beamed out

from the center, surrounded by drawings of various religious oddballs from the American

past. Joseph Smith, larger than many of the other figures, knelt in one comer holding the

gold plates at the feet of man, presumably Moroni, floating in the air above him. The

Mormons, the article told readers, "became respectable."26 But of course "respectable"

and safe are not the same thing: after all, Jim Jones wore a friendly face in public—on

24
Wayne King and Warren Weaver, Jr., "Washington Talk: Briefing," December 31, 1986.
25
Nick Ravo, "Pageant Gets Real Fire and a Flying Jesus," New York Times, July 23, 1988.
26
Boyce Rensberger, "Jonestown Has Many Precedents," New York Times, November 26, 1978.
 234

display in the illustration—that won him thousands of followers. Despite the Mormons'

friendly exterior, many Americans still believed that the beliefs behind the smiles were

potentially dangerous.

Non-Mormon Americans at both ends of the spectrum ominously warned that the

Mormons were bent on destroying lives and ruining the country. The God Makers, a 1982

film intended for distribution to conservative Protestant churches (now available on DVD

for purchase on the Internet), pieced together interviews with former Mormons attacking

unique Mormon beliefs. The film included segments on the secrecy of the temple,

ongoing revelation, the subservience of women, and the potential godhood of man, each

emphasizing Mormonism's difference from "true" Christianity and the abuses to which

these beliefs and practices supposedly made believers vulnerable. The filmmakers were

especially concerned with the Mormon belief that men can progress toward godhood in

the afterlife. They focused particularly on the physical nature of the Mormon afterlife, in

which, they claimed, featured "endless celestial sex." In this afterlife, according to the

filmmakers, each Mormon man-god's numberless celestial wives would serve as

broodmares, bearing endless numbers of spirit-children throughout eternity. Such beliefs,

the filmmakers affirmed again and again, were patently false (at this point in the film, a

listener within the story laughs disbelievingly and says, "sounds like science fiction or

Greek mythology!"), but they were still a danger to Mormon women because such

attitudes about a woman's proper place in heaven necessarily led to the denigration of

women in this life. Finally, they declared Mormonism a Satanic cult and the narrator

warned viewers that "[cjults are protected under the current legal system, and will
 235

continue to proliferate at the expense of human lives and families." The film ended with

the image of two typical young Mormon missionaries knocking on the door of a home.

The message was clear: they might be on your doorstep next, but if you let them in you
•yn

risk your family, your life, and your immortal soul.

Mormon theology fared little better with liberal observers, who were far less

concerned with Joseph Smith's visions and more concerned with the political

implications of Mormon theology as enforced by the contemporary Church leadership. In

his 1992 examination of what makes Americans tick, literary critic Harold Bloom

discussed a group of religions he identified as American Gnostics, particularly the

Southern Baptists and the Mormons. His tone, matching that of the faiths he described,

was at first warm and positive. He was particularly intrigued by Joseph Smith and the

Saints' early history, declaring that "[njothing else in all of American history strikes me

as material poetica equal to the early Mormons."28 But in the end Bloom intended his

work not as a paean but a prophetic warning: "We are on the verge of being governed by

a nationally established religion, an ultimate parody of the American Religion"—militant,

fundamentalist, pre-millennialist, and staunchly conservative, guided by "politicized

shamans" dedicated to enforcing their view of what is right regardless of the cost. From

the left as well as the right, the Mormons' beliefs looked no less frightening for being

ridiculous, because, inexplicably, ever-growing numbers of Americans believed.

J. Edward Decker, writer and dir., The God Makers (USA: Jeremiah Films, Inc., 1982). Decker
also co-authored a companion book, subtitled A Shocking Expose of What the Mormon Church Really
Believes. Decker and Dave Hunt (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1984).
28
Bloom, 69.
29
Bloom, 300-301.
Mormons and Sex: "a mean-spirited conspiracy against sex appeal"

After the sexual revolution in the 1960s and '70s radically redefined sex in

relationships and in American culture, polygamy was no longer the only topic dealing

with Mormon sexual mores to capture non-Mormons' attention. Americans continued to

remind themselves that no matter how distant polygamy might seem from the

contemporary Church, it was bom of former practices and contemporary beliefs shared

by the Church itself. Many Americans simply were not bothered, however, by the

persistence of a few pockets of radical fundamentalists who insisted—men and women

alike—on entering plural marriages. The concerns Americans did show about Mormon

marital practices in this period focused far more on the ways in which the Saints'

restrictions on sex prevented individuals from living happy, fulfilling lives. Women, first

and foremost, were regarded as the victims not only of plural marriage—viewed as

problematic for its immorality by some, but for its subjugation of women by many

others—but also of the Mormon insistence on male leadership in the Church, the world,

and the home. The Mormons' condemnation of premarital sex, it seemed to some,

routinely drove young people into unhealthy and unhappy marriages or into a debilitating

sense of shame and unworthiness when they failed to live up to their Church's strict

standards. In the popular imagination both men and women suffered from this

arrangement, as repressed sexual impulses twisted their characters and warped their

relationships. And as many increasingly accepted the more open presencde of

homosexuals in American society, the Saints' teachings that Mormons not only needed to

Deborah Laake, Secret Ceremonies: A Mormon Woman's Intimate Diary of Marriage and
Beyond(New York: Dell Publishing, 1993), 103.
 237

avoid extramarital sexual relations but, in order to reach the highest level of heaven, must

get married and have children, looked not merely like repression but like a form of active

torture for homosexuals who forced themselves to marry members of the opposite sex. It

was also punishment for the spouses they could not truly love. Mormon sexual mores,

from ongoing polygamy among fundamentalists to far more widespread restrictions on

relationships, between the sexes looked not both archaic and unhealthy to modem

American eyes.

First and foremost, though, polygamy remained a historical oddity, a piquant and

slightly funny bit of Americana. As the last generation of pioneers came to power,

profiles of important Saints highlighted not their own polygamy—by this time the leaders

had been bom to late for that—but their parents' plural marriages. When Joseph Fielding

Smith took over as President of the Church in 1970, for example, The New York Times

highlighted his childhood in a polygamous household as the fourth child of the second of

his father's six wives. The lives of the Church's early polygamous leaders garnered

similar attention. Samuel Taylor, who had already chronicled his father's polygamous life

in the early twentieth century, wrote a biography of his grandfather, Prophet John Taylor,

who presided over the Church during some of the most turbulent years of the federal

crackdown on polygamy in the 1880s.32 Former church historian Leonard J. Arlington's

31
"Sturdy Leader of the Saints: Joseph Fielding Smith, Jr.," New York Times, January 24, 1970.
32
The Kingdom or Nothing: The Life of John Taylor, Militant Mormon (New York: MacMillan,
1976).
 238

scholarly biography of Brigham Young—a New York Times "Notable Book of the

Year"—included an appendix neatly charting all of Young's wives and offspring.33

The fascination with polygamy, which was far less vitriolic than it had been in

previous generations, appeared on the stage as well. In the fall of 1968, the play "Woman

Is My Idea" premiered on Broadway after weeks of anticipation in The New York Times.

Much to the disappointment of the reviewer, however, the Mormon playwright had taken

the teeth out of polygamy. Plural marriage served merely as stage-dressing in the love

story of a young woman determined to win the heart of a confirmed bachelor—and keep

him to herself in a monogamous marriage. What little interest the play provided, the

reviewer informed readers, was in the persons of the real polygamists: the "imperiously

avuncular" Brigham Young and an "assiduous little lawyer with 3 wives, 20 or so

children and a dream of seeing his descendants up to the million mark in only a few

generations."34 The play lasted all of five performances on Broadway. A ballet that

titillated viewers with a story of the potential complications of plural love fared better.

The Utah Repertory Dance Theater company premiered "The Legacy," the story of a

young man who falls in love with his father's beautiful young third wife, in New York in

1972. While the initial review was lukewarm, just six years later another critic declared

Brigham Young: American Moses (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1985; Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 1986), 420-21. Citations are to the University of Illinois Press edition. See
"Christmas 1985: Notable Books of the Year," New York Times, December 8, 1985. The Times selected
Arrington's book for its end-of-the-year list despite reviewer Michiko Kakutani's complaint that "[a]bout
all that he's managed to do in 'American Moses' is make Young—and his accomplishments—seem dull."
Clearly Young's inherent interest, and not the writer's accomplishments in telling his story, made the book
worth recommending to readers. See "Books of the Times," April 17, 1985.
34
Clive Barnes, '"Woman Is My Idea' Is Presented at the Belasco," rev. of Don C. Liljenquist,
Woman Is My Idea, September 28, 1968.
 239

the piece among the best work presented by the choreographer's own dance troupe.35

Polygamy was still a reliable storyline in a variety of contexts, because Americans

remained both fascinated and repelled by the practice.

As dramatically polygamous storylines went, the 1969 film adaptation of the

musical Paint Your Wagon provided audiences with plenty of bang for their buck. The

film, which cost a record-setting $20 million and starred Clint Eastwood and Lee

Remick, rewrote nearly half of Lemer and Loewe's 1951 storyline. The film kept the

"love" story between crusty old miner Ben Rumson and the woman he buys off of a

passing Mormon—a troublesome second wife only too happy to part ways with her

husband and his first wife. But it added some extra naughty zest to the plot by having the

woman, Elizabeth, fall in love not only with Rumson but also with his "Pardner." When

the two men offer to let her choose between them, she refuses, insisting she wants to keep

them both. When the men argue in response that she could not possibly do such a thing,

she quickly replies, "Well, I was married to a man that had two wives. Why can't a

woman have two husbands?" The three then move into a cabin together, with Elizabeth

choosing which husband she wants in her bed each night. In the end of course, the arrival

of more civilized settlers makes Elizabeth and Pardner, too, realize that they want to be

respectable. The film ends with Rumson, who never wanted to settle down in the first

place, moving on to the next mining camp, leaving Pardner and Elizabeth behind as

monogamous man and wife. The film had its fun with plural marriage—turning the

35
"Dance: Utah Repertory Opens Series," New York Times, September 30, 1972; Jennifer
Dunning, "Bill Evans Dance Troupe Starts Season at Pace University," New York Times, January 21, 1978.
36
See Vincent Canby, "Old Wagons Never Die," rev. of Paint Your Wagon, Josh Logan, dir.
(USA: Paramount Pictures, 1969), New York Times, October 26, 1969.
institution on its head to give at least one woman a fair share of the action—before

reaffirming to audiences that all men and women are happiest when committed to only

one other.37

Against such a backdrop, real-life polygamy looked less frightening.

Unenlightened? Yes. Uncomfortable? Probably. But dangerous? Not really. Older travel

guides had directed tourists to old Mormon towns throughout the American Southwest

with promises of pioneer festivals and rodeos. In the late twentieth century, despite the

fact that plural marriage was still illegal, the small polygamous settlements dotting the

Western deserts with plural wives in quaint, old-fashioned dress and hordes of children

became points of interest as well. Colorado City, Arizona, famous under its former name

of Short Creek for raids against polygamists living there in the 1940s and '50s, attracted

travel writers interested in both the scenic beauty of the area and the odd culture thriving

there. In 1970, the New York Times featured extensive information on the polygamous

communities scattered along the Arizona-Utah border in an article on "New Tourist

Trails on the Arizona Strip." Ten years later, an article on photo-tourism in the area

casually noted "the usual packs of polygamists who rumble into Cedar City [Utah] on

Fridays in their pickups on supermarket runs" as if they were part of the scenery.39 And,

as in a 1987 article about a small town in Montana, the monogamous locals did not seem

Josh Logan, dir. (USA: Paramount Pictures, 1969), New York Times, October 26, 1969.
38
Jack Goodman, January 11, 1970.
39
Grace Lichtenstein, "Red Rock Country with a White Cover," New York Times, January 27,
1980.
 241

to mind: "A man can have as many wives as he wants [...] and no one around here

objects."40 In some ways, the sexual revolution thoroughly domesticated polygamy.

The national fascination extended not only to the polygamists themselves, but to

their tolerant neighbors. For many Americans, it was all well and good to drive through

the polygamous communities and gawk on a summer vacation, but to live with

polygamists was something else entirely. When violence broke out between rival groups

of fundamentalist Mormons in the late 1970s, the press reported on both the supposedly

growing numbers of polygamists out West and on the apathy of their good Mormon

neighbors. One man quoted in the article laconically noted, "them pligs is comin' up like

weeds," referring to polygamists without alarm by a slang term popular in the

intermountain West. But most surprising to the writer was the sunny indifference

exhibited by polite, well-spoken Mormons in the heart of Salt Lake City: "A more

common reaction was expressed by a Mormon sales clerk. 'Oh, we have some who live

down the street from us,' she said. 'They are the nicest people. Very clean and quiet and

law-abiding.'"41 One practicing Mormon went further, declaring in a letter to The New

York Times that while the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints no longer practiced

plural marriage, in keeping with the Supreme Court ruling that upheld laws forbidding

polygamy in the late-nineteenth century, all practicing Mormons continued to believe in

celestial marriage as the ideal family system practiced in the afterlife.42 Members of the

"Town in Montana Endures As an Outpost of Polygamy," New York Times, August 18, 1987.
41
Molly Ivins, "Polygamy, Growing in U.S. West, Is Encountering Little Opposition," New York
Times, October 9, 1977.
42
"Mormon Polygamy," letter to the editor, April 27, 1991.
 242

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Americans thought, were not that far

removed from polygamy after all.

Fundamentalist Mormons took advantage of the new tolerance of "alternative

lifestyles" in late twentieth-century America, pushing in court not, perhaps, for

recognition of their marital practices, but for recognition of their other rights in spite of

them. In 1983, for example, a man in suburban Salt Lake City sued when he was fired

from his job as a police officer because he had multiple wives.43 While he did not regain

his job, the case is noteworthy because, in spite of the national attention it received,

neither he nor his wives were arrested for unlawful cohabitation. A few years later, a

polygamous Utah man's battle to legally adopt the children of his dead third wife made

national headlines, particularly when the state high court ruled in 1991 that the man and

his remaining two wives could not be barred from adopting solely on the basis of their

polygamous lifestyle.44

But despite the new tolerance in principle toward polygamists, the practice still

represented an attitude toward the vulnerable members of society that many Americans

regarded as "sinful, or worse, sexist." 5 As the lawyer representing family members

trying to prevent the polygamist family from adopting told reporters, "In Utah there's a

little bit of desensitization to the oddity of the whole thing because of our past [....]

43
"Utah Case Revives Polygamy Dispute: Ex-Mormon with Three Wives Sues over His Dismissal
from Suburban Police Force," New York Times, September 12, 1983.
44
"Utah Polygamists Allowed to Adopt: State High Court Affirms Ban on Multiple Spouses But
Allows Some Rights," New York Times, March 29, 1991; Dirk Johnson, "Polygamists Emerge from
Secrecy, Seeking Not Just Peace But Respect," New York Times, April 9, 1991.
45
Walter Goodman, "An American History of Plural Marriages," rev. A Matter of Principle:
Polygamy in the Mountain West, Ken Verbie, prod. (Salt Lake City, UT: KUED-TV, 1991), New York
Times, August 30, 1991.
There's the feeling that it isn't hurting anybody. But it hurts the children." Some

observers described women and children in fundamentalist polygamous communities

acting as if they were frightened of outsiders and unsure of how to behave in the world

beyond their compounds. Assessments of the "shy wives"47 of modem polygamous

patriarchs mirrored one art critic's description of photographs of nineteenth-century

plural Mormon families with their "multiplicity of set-faced, uncompetitive wives."48

Americans were certain this was not a victimless practice.

Elisabeth McDonald's 1978 novel of polygamy in pioneer Utah described one

first wife's heartbreak as her husband, at first reluctantly and later with gusto, added

younger and more beautiful women to his stable of wives. McDonald's novel suggested,

according to one reviewer, that "the Everlasting Covenant was little more than a

theological justification for unrestrained randiness." Such callousness on the part of the

men eventually killed their wives' spirits.49 Wives of the Wind, another bodice-ripping

tale of plural marriage, promised to take readers along for the ride on "the disaster-

fraught pilgrimage on which polygamy is likely to take a man and his women."

Following the arduous marital journey of a Mormon man and his four wives—one

bitterly jealous, one mad with grief, one disgusted by sex, and one philandering with her

"Custody Battle in Utah's Top Court Shines Rare Spotlight on Polygamy," New York Times,
June 12, 1989.
47
Goodman, "New Tourist Trails on the Arizona Strip."
48
John Russell, "Boston Museum's 'Far West' Show Is a Hit," New York Times, February 24,
1975.
49
Jonathan Yardley, "Looking Backwards," rev. Watch for the Morning (New York: Scribner,
1978), New York Times, April 16, 1978.
husband s much younger brother—the novel vividly illustrated the potential pitfalls and

certain misery of polygamous life.50

Americans did not believe that misery in Mormon married life was reserved for

those who pursued a plural adventure. While the main body of Latter-day Saints no

longer allowed husbands to take more than one helpmeet, the wives and daughters that

peopled stories of contemporary Mormon families were no less dominated or broken for

that. In Loving Hands at Home—an "inventive and amusing" "farce"—the author

followed the comings and goings of the women in an average Mormon family living in

modem Los Angeles.51 But while on the surface the Frys are the perfect family, each

woman in the story is fighting her own demons. The domineering matriarch demands

perfection of her sons' wives, berating them for their failure to mind their children and

their homes according to her standards. One daughter-in-law, the narrator, finds

excitement by randomly applying for jobs that she has no intention of taking—after all,

women are not meant to work outside the home. A second, the devoted mother of seven

children, copes with her unhappiness and boredom by dallying with handymen she calls

to her house. The third, the most committed and accepting housewife of them all,

discovers that her husband is having an affair with his female boss and makes up her

mind to live with it. Each woman is, in her own way, a perfect illustration of the

problems outlined by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, and each woman is

trapped in her misery by the mandates of her religion.

50
Michael Malone, "Other Times and Places," rev. of Marjorie Jarrett, Wives of the Wind (New
York: Seaview Books, 1981), New York Times, January 11, 1981. Quote reprinted in Advertisement, New
York Times, March 15, 1981.
51
Untitled review of Diane Johnson, Loving Hands at Home (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, Inc., 1968), New York Times, October 27, 1968.
 245

But the piece de resistance of modem jeremiads against the dangers Mormonism

posed to women was without a doubt Deborah Laake's Secret Ceremonies: A Mormon

Woman's Intimate Diary of Marriage and Beyond. The book was wildly popular, holding

a place on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list for much of the summer of 1993,

and again in paperback in the summer of 1994. The Times profiled Laake in 1993 at the
e-y

same time that it recommended the book as summer beach reading. Laake told a

harrowing tale of life as a woman in a Church and community that inflated male egos at

the expense of women's lives and sanity. Mormon men "couldn't really help it," she said,

because "their training was extreme: All their lives, they were schooled in the greatness

of their own power." The result for women was a "senseless sense of inferiority that

characterized all my dealings with men."54 After she married the right Mormon boy and

started trying to become the right kind of Mormon housewife, Laake looked at herself

and a friend and realized "we were fading."55 But the Church not only trained its men to

be megalomaniacs and its women to be subservient automatons; it also taught its

members to hate their bodies and their sexuality. The Church enforced such teachings

first with lectures on the evils of immodest dress and immoral (unchaste) behavior. But it

also required members who had undergone the temple endowments, the passage to

adulthood for faithful Mormons, to wear sacred undergarments that Laake declared "a

Molly O'Neill, "Secrets Revealed: A Coming-of-Age Tale Strikes a Chord with Despairing
Women and Sends Mormons into an Uproar over Revelations of the Church's Sacred Rituals," and "A
Reading List for Beach Bags," July 25, 1993.
53
Laake, 38.
54
Laake, 158.
55
Laake, 179.
 246

mean-spirited conspiracy against sex appeal."56 Looking at herself wearing her garments,

considering how they would prevent her from wearing sleeveless or low-cut tops and

shorts or skirts that did not reach below her knees, Laake "figured that from this moment

on I was a freak."57 Laake's desperate unhappiness with her domineering priesthood-

holding husband, her life of enforced idleness and intellectual atrophy as a housewife,

and her doctrinally sponsored sense of her own inferiority eventually led, she claimed, to

neurotic behavior (including compulsive masturbation, a detail gleefully noted in the

Times profile), depression, and several suicide attempts. Laake, like anti-Mormon writers

of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, assured her readers that being a

Latter-day Saint could literally kill a woman.

Finally, in 1993, a young, little-known playwright named Tony Kushner earned

rave reviews for his two-part epic play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National

Themes. Written first and foremost as a rallying cry for gay rights against the

conservative religious and social forces that dominated American politics throughout the

1980s, the Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning plays featured three Mormon

characters whose lives became intertwined with a complex cast of characters including

gay and HIV-positive men, an African American and several Jews, and the Angel of

America. Joe Pitt, a young Mormon man whose religion is virtually indistinguishable

from his conservative Republican politics, is perhaps the most heartbreaking character in

the play. During the course of the story, Joe admits that he is gay, has a short-lived affair

with a man, and, when he tries to patch up his marriage after his gay relationship falls

56
Laake, 103.
"Laake, 104.
 247

apart, finally loses the long-suffering wife he has never been able to truly love. And for

what? Why must Joe sacrifice this part of himself? As Joe angrily declares to his wife,

Does it make any difference? That I might be one thing deep

within, no matter how wrong or ugly that thing is, so long as I have
fought, with everything I have, to kill it. [...] there's nothing left, I'm a
shell. There's nothing left to kill.
As long as my behavior is what I know it has to be. Decent.
Correct. That alone in the eyes of God.
CO

But his wife refuses to accept this statement: "No, no, that's Utah talk, Mormon talk."

Kushner made a distinction in the play between the beliefs that he thinks define the

Mormon faith and the institution that defines and mediates that religion for the faithful,

and produced a resounding condemnation of the contemporary authorities controlling

Joe's Church. Those authorities, Kushner declared—like the leaders of the Republican

Party under President Ronald Reagan, Joe's hero—coerced members into suppressing

their natural human behaviors under pain of eternal exclusion from the celestial kingdom.

For gay men and women, then, just as for straight women, adherence to the unhealthy

sexual repression demanded by the Church led to a life characterized for many by misery

and self-loathing. As Americans extended their criticism of Mormon attitudes toward sex

beyond polygamy, it boiled down to their rejection of the idea that Church leaders should

hold sway in people's bedrooms—or anywhere outside of church.

Kushner, Angels in America (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 46.
 248

Violence: "the logical and culminating act of a society whose leaders believed
themselves superior to the rest of mankind"59

In the mid-twentieth century, some observers sought to understand nineteenth-

century Mormons' violent acts in historical context, arguing that the general violence of

the frontier and the particular threats and violence directed at Mormons by their Gentile

neighbors combined to spark Mormon retaliations. But as the nation struggled through

political assassinations and urban race riots at home and the Vietnam conflict abroad,

Americans' patience for violence of every sort waned. Further, a series of high-profile

violent crimes committed by and against Mormons in the intermountain West seemed to

confirm the perception that the Saints were violent even when they were not being

pushed to it by persecution. Each gruesome murder became grist for the national mill,

appearing to a frightened yet fascinated American public again and again in news reports,

true-crime books, novels loosely based on true stories, made-for-television movies, and

even big-budget films. These terrible events took on broader significance as Americans

looked for explanations—and often blamed Mormon religion and culture. Rather than

identifying Mormon murderers as isolated criminals or viewing them in the wider context

of violence in American culture, many viewed these acts as proof that Mormonism itself

fostered a culture of violence.

Early in this period images of Mormons as unwilling victims of their Gentile

neighbors still dominated discussion of the Saints troubled history. The 1969 final report

to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, after declaring

William Wise, Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Legend and a Monumental

Crime (New York: Crowell, 1976), book jacket.
that "Americans have always been a violent people," noted the nineteenth-century

Mormons' withdrawal from a social environment they found "overpowering and

threatening."60 Just a year later, a show at the Whitney Museum in New York featured

the work of nineteenth-century Mormon painter Carl Christian Anton Christensen. The

exhibition focused on Christensen's images of the Mormon trek West—which the artist

himself had completed on foot in the 1850s. But the image chosen to illustrate The New

York Times review of the show was not of the famed handcart expedition. Rather, the

Times selected a painting of a mob attacking a Mormon settlement. While the paper

mocked similarities between Christensen's work and Cecil B. DeMille's overwrought

religious movies, the image nevertheless painted the Saints as fighting for their homes

and their lives. Terrified women and children race into the forest, groups of men chase

and fondle pleading women, and other mobbers attack houses with poles and axes as one

cabin bums brightly in the background. However kitschy Christensen's execution might

have been, the reviewer did not deny the inherent drama or the truth of the historical

events he depicted.61

Such perspectives did not live long into the new decade. While acknowledging

that the Saints had suffered at the hands of their Gentile neighbors in the nineteenth

century, many asserted that Mormons had been hardened by the experience until they

became intolerant bullies themselves. An editorial on the proliferation of religious cults

in the United States argued that persecution only intensified the already twisted beliefs

60
"Text of Conclusions in Report to Commission on Violence in America," New York Times, June
6, 1969.
61
Hilton Kramer, "Rediscovered Painter of the Mormon Trek," July 26, 1970.
 250

and behaviors of such groups. "The psychological violence that results from the constant

oppression of deviant ideas," he declared, "can lead to the same bellicose intolerance that

overtook the Pilgrims and the Mormons after they established their religious

hegemonies."62 The Pilgrims, of course, had dissipated long before into various forms of

mainline Protestantism. But the author did not indicate whether the Mormons' religious

hegemony had ended with the territorial period or, as many argued, continued in the

Mormon-dominated intermountain West up to the present day. Thus the writer's attitude

toward the contemporary Church, like that of many Americans, remained ambiguous.

In 1971, Samuel Woolley Taylor produced yet another exploration of his

religion's past, this time examining the swift rise and precipitous fall of the Mormon

colony of Nauvoo in the 1840s. While Taylor acknowledged that the Saints' time in

Illinois ended in murder, plunder, and destruction at the hands of Gentile mobs and

militia, he assigned a significant portion of the blame to the Mormons themselves. After

all, he claimed, "the violent history of the Saints prior and subsequent to the expulsion at

Nauvoo shows they couldn't get along with their neighbors anywhere." Apparently the

burden of peaceful coexistence—of "get[ting] along with their neighbors"—lay primarily

with the Saints, and thus the fault for failure was theirs as well. And who would not want

to get rid of such neighbors?, he seemed to argue. Using what he labeled a popular

Mormon legend as evidence, Taylor noted that this was a community in which the

autocratic leader Brigham Young gifted his most violent emissary, the assassin Orrin

Ken Kelley, "Get Your Red-Hot Panaceas!" New York Times, January 19, 1974.
Nightfall at Nauvoo (New York: MacMillan, 1971), x.
 251

Porter Rockwell, with someone else's wife as a reward for murder.64 Clearly no

respectable community would want a group in the neighborhood whose leaders showed

so little regard for the rights of individual men and women.

Five years later William Wise offered readers a sensationalized new interpretation

of the Mountain Meadows massacre, in which a group of Mormons and Indians killed

approximately 120 Gentile emigrants in 1857. Wise dismissed historian Juanita Brooks'

widely respected study of the event. The massacre was not, he declared, simply a terrible

isolated incident that resulted from the Saints' fears of expulsion or extermination in the

face of federal troops sent by President Buchanan to subdue the Utah territory. Rather,

siding with William Alexander Linn (whose heavily-biased 1902 history of the Saints he

quoted on the frontispiece to his book), Wise argued that the massacre was the natural

result of the violence at the root of early Mormon religion. Brigham Young, Wise

declared, not only knew about the massacre—he ordered it. The book's jacket assured

readers that "the massacre of the Fancher party was not an isolated incident but the

logical and culminating act of a society whose leaders believed themselves superior to the

rest of mankind and who maintained that their own ecclesiastical laws took precedence

over the laws of their country." The general consensus among scholars was that Wise's

book was poorly researched and unfairly biased.65 Even the New York Times reviewer

acknowledged that the book was "as one-sided and intolerant as the Brigham Young it

describes." And yet, he went on to declare it "one of the half dozen boldest and most

64
Ibid., 354.
65
See reviews by Robert F. Gish, "History Bloody History," The North American Review 262, no.
2 (Summer 1977), 65-67; Charles S. Peterson, The American Historical Review 82, no. 4 (Oct., 1977),
1072; and Char Miller, Pacific Historical Review 47, no. 3 (Aug., 1978), 485-86.
 252

important books ever written on Mormonism."66 Historical evidence to the contrary

aside, Wise followed the long American tradition of painting all Mormons and their faith

with a brush dipped in the blood spilled but a few dozen Church members during one day

at Mountain Meadows.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, several high profile murders in Utah drew the

national media's glaring spotlight. These crimes, like William Hooper Young's murder in

1902, seemed to confirm Americans' fears that the Mormons were, indeed, more prone to

violence than the rest of the population, and that they were driven to it by their religion.

At the front of the pack was Gary Gilmore, the first man to be executed in the United

States since the Supreme Court had opened the way for states to reinstate the death

penalty in the 1970s. Gilmore, who murdered two young men in Utah in 1976, was not

Mormon, but newspapers frequently reminded readers that he had been living in Utah

with family members who were.67 Americans seemed particularly fascinated with the fact

that Gilmore wanted to be killed by a firing squad, "maintained in this largely Mormon

state in keeping with the religion's adherence to the biblical tenet of blood atonement."

"Prophets of the church," this writer explained, "have reinforced the belief that a man

convicted of a heinous crime can help atone for his sins if blood flows in the course of his

death." Gilmore reportedly declared through a lawyer that he chose the firing squad

Stanley P. Hirshson, Review of Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Legend and a

Monumental Crime by William Wise (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), December 26, 1976.
67
See, for example, "Utah High Court Postpones Execution of Killer Who Pleads for Death," New
York Times, November 9, 1976, in which the writer introduced "the killer's uncle, Vern D'Amico," as "a
Mormon who assisted him in obtaining parole." There was no clear reason, in the context of the story, to
introduce D'Amico's religious background.
because he agreed with the Mormon concept of blood atonement. Thus the Mormon

state enacted not simply execution, but the shedding of blood.

Gilmore's notoriety did not end with his death in January 1977. In April of that

year, Playboy magazine ran a heavily-edited transcript of interviews with Gilmore

conducted before his death. Two years later Norman Mailer's Pulitzer Prize-winning

non-fiction novel The Executioner's Song explored Gilmore's crimes and the media

frenzy they inspired at length. For Mailer, the tragedy of the murders of Benny Bushnell

and Max Jensen began the moment Gary Gilmore joined his family in Utah, following

"practically the same route their Mormon great-grandfather took when he jumped off

from Missouri with a handcart near to a hundred years ago, and pushed west with all he

owned over the prairies, and the passes of the Rockies, to come to rest at Provo in the

Mormon Kingdom of Deseret just fifty miles below Salt Lake."70 Gilmore's story was,

according to Mailer, very much a story of the Mormons, and Mormonism provided not

only his family history but also the context for his crimes. His victims were upstanding

young men—returned missionaries—of exactly the type that the Mormon community

demanded and that Gilmore could not possibly be. Early in Mailer's telling, Gilmore's

uncle recognizes the potential problems with bringing a hardened felon to Provo to build

a life for himself: "Gary wasn't coming into an average community. He was entering a

Mormon stronghold. Things were tough enough for a man just out of prison without

68
Jon Nordheimer, "Utah Convict Wants to Wed Before Death," New York Times, November 14,
1976.
69
"Playboy Interview: Gary Gilmore" (April 1977), 69-92, 130, 174-86.
70
Mailer, The Executioner's Song (Boston, MA: Littler, Brown, 1979; New York: Vintage
International, 1998), 10. All citations are to the Vintage International edition. In The New York Times,
reviewer Joan Didion emphasized the connection between the Utah landscape, the Mormon faith it shaped,
and the crimes that Gary Gilmore committed. See '"I Want to Go Ahead and Do It,'" October 7, 1979.
 254

71

having to deal with people who thought drinking coffee and tea was sinful." The 1982

television movie, with a screenplay by Mailer, vividly illustrated the community's

overbearing judgment with a church steeple that dominates the film's opening shot and in

the person of one of Gilmore's coworkers. The man lives on the outskirts of town in a

small trailer plastered with images of Jesus and, when confronted there, insists on
79

kneeling in spoken prayer with his visitor. Just as Mormon theology prescribed and

meted out the bloody punishment that Gilmore believed might help him atone for his

sins, American's believed it also established the implacable social standards that were the

context in which Gilmore's rage at his sense of failure drove him to murder.

The mid-1970s also saw a widely reported wave of internecine violence between

rival polygamous fundamentalist groups. In 1975, members of the LeBaron family living

in a colony in Mexico attacked a rival faction of their own community with shotguns and

firebombs. Two people were killed and twelve injured, and at least four suspects fled
1%

north across the American border to evade police. Two years later, The New York Times

reported that followers of Ervil LeBaron were wanted for the murder of rival

fundamentalist prophet Rulon Alfred. News reports emphasized that both LeBaron's and

Alfred's communities were distinct from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,

and that both leaders had been excommunicated for their open practice of polygamy. But

stories that the Utah police were searching for LeBaron and his followers at the Church's

semi-annual conference in Salt Lake City raised the specter of Samuel Woolley Taylor's
71
Ibid., 8.
72
Lawrence Schiller, dir. The Executioner's Song (USA: Film Communications, Inc., 1982).
NBC.
73
Everett R. Holies, "4 Sought in Death of 2 Ex-Mormons: Polygamous Religious Cult Rent by
New Violence," New York Times, January 5, 1975.
 255

warning twenty years earlier that polygamous fundamentalists had infiltrated the Church

and were manipulating it from within.74 Eventually LeBaron and several followers were

caught, tried, and convicted on various charges relating to several murders. According to

prosecutors, LeBaron convinced his followers to commit murder by telling them their

victims were false prophets.75 Thus their faith inspired them to murder.

LeBaron, labeled "the Mormon Manson" even as the Church insisted that

fundamentalist polygamists were not Mormons, inspired a number of factual and fictional

dramatizations. In 1983, mystery novelist Gary Stewart published The Tenth Virgin, in
lf\

which the villain bore a striking resemblance to LeBaron. Messenger of Death, a 1988

film vehicle for action star Charles Bronson, featured rival polygamous sects led by two

brothers, which Bronson referred to simply as "Mormons" throughout much of the

movie. Both factions revere the image of an avenging angel, a clear reference to Brigham

Young's supposed band of Mormon secret police in nineteenth-century Utah. Their

religion is one of retribution and blood. After the murder of three polygamous wives and

several children in the home of one leaders' son—filmed in gory detail—the patriarch,

believing that his rival ordered the murders, leads a number of men in an attack on his

brother's compound. They are enacting their doctrine, which one leader preached to his

small flock early in the film: "Though the anti-Christ comes in the guise of a friend—in

74
"Utah's Police Press Search in a Slaying: Mormon Conference to Be Focus of Hunt for Suspects
in Death of Polygamous Leader," New York Times, September 29, 1977. See Taylor, I Have Six Wives: A
True Story of Present-Day Plural Marriage (New York: Greenberg Publisher, Inc., 1956) and discussion in
chapter 4, pp. 190-91.
75
See Molly Ivins, "4 in a Cult in Utah on Trial in Slaying," New York Times, March 7, 1979;
"Leader of Polygamous Sect Guilty in the Murder of a Rival in Utah," New York Times, May 29, 1980.
76
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983. See E. J., Untitled Review, New York Times, November 13,
1983.
 256

the guise of your brother!—you must recognize him and smite him! Your own brother—

smite him! Annihilate him! Obliterate him from the face of the earth and all his

progeny!" In the end, both men are killed along with a number of their followers. While

the story concluded with Bronson proving that someone outside the "Mormon"

communities paid to have the women and children killed precisely to turn the

polygamists against each other, the conclusion was far less compelling than the brutal

Mormon clan warfare that took up two-thirds of the film.77 Regardless of the true identity

of the murderer, the film was premised on the connection between Mormons, blood

atonement, and violence that simmered just beneath the surface.

Finally, in 1993, Scott Anderson thrilled readers with a true-crime book about the

Mormon Manson's followers' ongoing devotion to his orders and the murders they

continued to commit in his name. Where earlier retellings of the LeBaron story made

mostly indirect references to the connection between LeBaron's polygamous sect and the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Anderson was brutally direct: "The

unpleasant fact is, the Mormon Church gave Ervil LeBaron a lot of material to work

with."78 Anderson went on to argue that "[i]f Ervil LeBaron had not been a Mormon, he

might still have been a murderous sociopath, but he would not have been able to delude

others into believing he received 'heavenly instruction,' a precedent established by

Joseph Smith."79 Without Mormonism, LeBaron quite simply would not have been able

to establish his cult or convince so many people to believe in him: "It was only within the

77
J. Lee Thompson, dir., Messenger of Death (USA: MGM, 1988).
78
Scott Anderson, The 4 O'Clock Murders: The True Story of a Mormon Family's Vengeance
(New York: Doubleday, 1993), 5.
79
Anderson, 5.
 257

Mormon faith—a religion which sanctified murder in its early years, which believes in

the advent of all-powerful Prophets and which has a rich folkloric history of divine

revelations—that had access to the unique tools he needed to build his cult."80 The mere

fact of the history that the Church shared with fundamentalists like LeBaron was an

indictment of the contemporary Church itself. As with polygamy and the Mountain

Meadows massacre, small groups and isolated incidents were treated as representative of

all Latter-day Saints.

Finally, at least one oft-retold crime seemed to prove that the most contemporary

of Mormon beliefs—the patriarchal structure of the family in this world and in the

hereafter—drove people to violence. Two true-crime books, published in 1985 and turned

into made-for-TV movies in 1986, told the story of the murder of Franklin Bradshaw—

routinely identified on book jackets and in reviews as a "Mormon millionaire." In 1979,

Bradshaw's own grandson traveled to Utah and murdered him. Even worse, he did so on

the orders of his mother, Bradshaw's daughter. Journalist Jonathan Coleman explained

the murder as the result of a deeply dysfunctional family.81 Writer Shana Alexander's

New York Times bestseller Nutcracker, however, went further, blaming that dysfunction

on Mormonism. "Mormonism is a male religion, a dream of prophets and patriarchs,"

with the same culture and cohesion among men as "Masons, college fraternity brothers,
R9

or cannibals in New Guinea." This "society and culture devised by old men" turned

Franklin Bradshaw into a workaholic who neglected his family, twisted his wife into an
80
Ibid., 5-6.
81
At Mother's Request: A True Story of Money, Murder, and Betrayal (New York: Atheneum,
1985).
82
Nutcracker: Money, Madness, and Murder: A Family Album (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1985), 30.
unhappy harpy, and turned his children against him. In particular, her father's

compulsive Mormon thrift, which looked to his wife and children merely like tight-fisted

control of the family's money, and the subservience that Mormon culture demanded of

her drove Bradshaw's youngest daughter to hate him so deeply that she convinced his

own grandchild to murder him. Whether through historical doctrines that encouraged

violence against perceived sinners or through contemporary theological restrictions that

pulled families apart and drove some members of the community to hate so deeply that

they could kill, in the late twentieth century Mormonism appeared to many Americans to

foster a culture of violence that threatened everyone who came into contact with it.

Theocracy: "the Mormon church is not a 'democracy'"84

As the Church leadership reasserted unique Mormon beliefs to strengthen

boundaries between the Latter-day Saints and the rest of American culture, it also firmly

aligned the Church with the social values of an earlier America that was swiftly fading in

the nation's rearview mirror. Alongside many conservative evangelical and

fundamentalist Protestants, Mormons pushed for legislation at all levels of government

that would protect—and enforce—those conservative social values throughout American

society. And it used its enviable (but still undisclosed) wealth and super-efficient

institutional organization to promote its views. The Church was not the only religious

institution in the United States to thus straddle Thomas Jefferson's wall of separation

between church and state. But with its theocratic history and the ready arsenal of 150

83
Quotation on Alexander, 30.
84
M. George Stevenson, Letter to the Editor, New York Times, February 9, 1986.
 259

years worth of negative images of the Church's involvement in the political, economic,

and social lives of its members and their neighbors, it was an easy target for critics of the

social and political activities of the religious right in the late twentieth century.

Sydney Ahlstom revolutionized the study of American religious history with the

publication of his National Book Award-winning study A Religious History of the

American People in 1972. Treating religions on their own terms, rather than with the

open bias toward mainline Protestant Christianity of many earlier texts, Ahlstrom's book

included a much wider array of religions than previous histories. He dedicated more

space to Mormonism than many previous scholars, and his examination neither ignored

nor unfairly demeaned those aspects of the religion's origins and theology that Americans

frequently found uncomfortable. But Ahlstrom recognized that Joseph Smith and

Brigham Young intended Mormonism to extend well beyond the religious sphere of

members' lives, and thus dedicated much of his examination of Mormonism to its

domination of life into what he called not an empire in the West but, more blandly, a

"regional-culture area."85 Ahlstrom told his readers that, although the explicit idea of

establishing a theocratic Kingdom of God died with the frontier, it died hard. Nauvoo was

"almost an autonomous theocratic principality," and he tacitly accepted that the Saints'

flight beyond American borders in the late 1840s was a rejection of the United States.86

In Ahlstrom's own day, the Mormons represented "an impressive sub-culture" distinct

from the rest of the nation—in the words of sociologist Thomas O'Dea, a "near-nation"

unto themselves. While "Mormons sometimes appear to have another white middle-class

85
501-502.
86
506.
 260

denomination with obvious Yankee origins," in fact "they remain a people apart."87 For

Ahlstrom the Mormons' differences from the mainline Protestant cultural norm were

more important than their similarities, and those differences were predicated in the late

twentieth century on Mormon adherence not simply to a different theology, but on social,

economic, and political differences as well. He did not note that, in the context of the

burgeoning conflict between conservative and progressive values in American culture,

those differences brought Mormons into agreement with as many Americans as it

separated them from.

While some Americans described Mormonism as an "anomaly of the authoritarian

organization producing a closed society in a democratic nation," most were concerned

not about what the Mormons did within their own community but rather about their

attempts to spread their social views well beyond the boundaries of their religion.88 Early

in 1973, NBC ran a news story entitled "When the Saints Come Marching In," which

promised readers a peek at the "organizational expertise that's the envy of many a giant

corporation."89 And where did Mormons put this organizational expertise to work? In the

ultraconservative political organization the John Birch Society, which Apostle (later

Prophet and President) Ezra Taft Benson supported throughout the 1960s, and, more

influentially, in Republican politics.90 President Richard Nixon employed Mormon

8/
508.
88
Quoting Professor Sterling J. McMurrin. Peter Bart, "The Mormon Nation," New York Times,
July 3, 1981.
89
Advertisement, New York Times, November 11, 1973.
90
See for example Wallace Turner, "Rightists Strong in Wallace Drive: Birchers and Others Play
Key Role in West," New York Times, September 29, 1968.
 261

businessman J. Willard Marriott to organize his inauguration in 1968. He also placed

two Mormons, David Kennedy and George Romney, on his Cabinet.92 George Romney

later served as honorary chairman of George H.W. Bush's campaign for the 1980

Republican presidential nomination.93 And in 1980, President Ronald Reagan supported

Mormon Richard Richards for chair of the Republican National Committee.94 It is no

surprise, then, that throughout the 1980s, both the media and organizers routinely named

Mormons as among the constituents of the ultimate conservative religious-political

machine, the Moral Majority, Inc.95

The Mormons were obvious joiners, combining forces individually and

collectively with other Americans on various political and social issues that reflected

their religious values. But frequently their activities—even those as unobjectionable as

patriotic fervor—were treated as evidence of a unique institutional penchant for

breaching the separation of church and state: "There are few who match the patriotism of

the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons who founded Utah and

still preside over its government."96 According to some, such intertwining of religion and

government extended well beyond Utah's borders. Journalist Wallace Turner noted in

1974 that while Mormons were a distinct minority in high-level federal positions, they

91
Roy Reed, "Chief Planner for Inauguration: J. Willard Marriott," New York Times, January 29,
1969.
92
See "Housing," New York Times, December 12, 1968, and "A Banker Who Never Says Never:
David Matthew Kennedy," New York Times, September 5, 1969.
93
"Romney Won't Stay on Sidelines," New York Times, December 9, 1979.
94
Adam Clymer, "Utah Lawyer Is Said to Be Reagan Choice As G.O.P. National Chairman," New
York Times, December 17, 1980.
95
See, for example, Advertisement, New York Times, March 23, 1981; "Briefing: A Limit on
Prayer," New York Times, September 4, 1982; "Name That Majority," New York Times, January 8, 1986.
96
Anthony Ripley, "The American Flag a Center of Dispute on Birthday of U.S.," New York
Times, July 5, 1971.
 262

were a pervasive presence at the lower levels of Washington's bureaucracy: "the

Government is shot through with Mormons."97 After her excommunication from the

Church feminist Sonia Johnson, founder of the group Mormons for ERA (Equal Rights

Amendment), declared, "They've honeycombed the executive offices. Washington is

becoming known as 'Salt Lake East.'" Such claims were reminiscent of early twentieth

century illustrations of Mormonism as an octopus with its body centered over Salt Lake

City and tentacles stretching across the country in every direction, with the longest

encircling Washington DC. Despite notable moments when Utahans voted against the

Church, as when Utah went for FDR for President or voted to ratify the constitutional

amendment ending Prohibition, Americans believed the Church had always controlled

Utah. In that light it now looked as if they were expanding their power into the halls of

national government.

In addition to infiltrating the national government, Mormons were viewed as

using their financial resources to swing voters in political debates over moral questions

like abortion, women's rights, and gay rights. Stories about the Saints' financial resources

were less frequent in the late twentieth century than they had been a fifty years earlier,

but those that were published showed that Americans accepted as a given the Saints' vast

wealth built on members' tithes and economic domination of the intermountain West.

Stories about the Church leadership routinely emphasized the Church's many business

interests, and profiles of Mormon politicians and celebrities regularly noted that they

97
Wallace Turner, "Life in Washington Gives Mormons a New Network," New York Times,
September 16, 1974.
98
Martha G. Wilson, "New Jersey Guide: E.R.A., Anyone?" New York Times, September 20,
1981.
 263

tithed ten percent of their income to the Church.99 While the Church did not release

financial statements, journalists periodically attempted to estimate its worth. Wallace

Turner simply told readers in 1969 that the embezzlement of $600,000 from church

coffers was "by no means disastrous," given the fact that the Church was "immensely

wealthy from the tithing of 10 percent of the total income of the fully faithful among its

2.5 million members."100 In 1985, John Heinerman and Anson Shupe published The

Mormon Corporate Empire, which declared that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day

Saints was worth more than $8 billion in property and business holdings in banking,

industry, and media.101 A Phoenix, Arizona, newspaper estimated in 1991 that the

Church's annual revenue reached $4.3 billion in tithes and another $400 million from its

business interests.102 And what did the Church do with all this wealth? "[T]he Mormons

raise money to finance telling the rest of us how to live our lives."103

The Mormon vision of how to live the good life remained much the same as it had

been throughout the twentieth century. The Church was, according to one report, "the

darling of corporate employers who cherish its labor pool: young, well-educated, non-

union and reared with the hard-work ethos of the pervasive Mormon faith."10 The

Church forbade tobacco, alcohol, and caffeinated beverages like coffee and tea—which

99
Examples of the former include profiles of new Prophets as they succeeded to their post at the
head of the Church throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Prominent examples of the latter attention to tithing
are Republican politician George Romney and professional golfers Billy Casper and Johnny Miller.
IOO " j r u s t e ( j Employee Accused in $600,000 Mormon Church Thefts," New York Times, June 3,
1969.
101
Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1985.
102
"Income of Mormon Church Is Put at $4.7 Billion a Year," New York Times, July 2, 1991.
103
Wallace Turner, "Ledgers of the Latter-day Saints," rev. The Mormon Corporate Empire by
John Heinerman and Anson Shupe (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), New York Times, April 6, 1986.
104
Dirk Johnson, "In Utah, Prosperity Is Making Room for Diversity," New York Times, August
25, 1991.
 264

was why, according to reports, reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes would only hire

Mormon aides during the last years of his life.105 But Mormons were not content to keep

these practices to themselves. Utah, despite a growing Gentile population, continued to

enforce stringent restrictions on the purchase and consumption of alcohol.106 On the

national front they joined forces with the PTA and Baptist organizations, among others,

in an effort to ban ads for beer and wine from television.107 And, as head of the FCC, a
1 OS

Mormon supported a similar ban on tobacco advertisements on TV. But Mormons did

not stop there: "The church is opposed not only to alcohol but also to tobacco, coffee, tea,

abortion, the feminist movement, homosexuality, pornography and 'permissiveness.'"10

Americans believed the Church was opposed not only for members, but for the entire

nation. They sought, many were certain, to control the behavior of all Americans.

Brigham Young University proved a testing ground for many such Mormon

proscriptions on behavior. In 1978, the United States government threatened to sue the

university over its policy forbidding unmarried men and women from cohabiting on

campus, as well as its arrangement with many off-campus landlords in the surrounding

area that extended the practice well beyond Church property. Eventually the Justice
See, for example, "Life of Howard Hughes Was Marked by a Series of Bizarre and Dramatic
Events," New York Times, April 6, 1976.
106
See "Liquor Assailed by Mormon Head," New York Times, October 6,1968, and Alden
Whitman, "Liquor-by-Drink Issue: A Proposal to Liberalize Law in Utah Far Overshadows Race for
President," New York Times, October 29, 1968.
107
Sally Bedell Smith, "Drive Mounted to Ban TV Beer and Wine Ads," New York Times, January
15, 1985.
108
Jack Gould, "TV Hazards of Smoking: Cancer Society Is Given Half Hour on WNBC to Depict
Dangers," New York Times, February 24, 1969; Elizabeth B. Drew, "The Cigarette Companies Would
Rather Fight Than Switch," New York Times, May 4, 1969.
109
Molly Ivins, "Salt Lake City Changing As Ties to Mormon Church Fade," New York Times,
September 12, 1979. See also Albin Krebs, "Gerald Ford Freeway Is Opened," New York Times, December
12, 1974, which includes a note on Apostle Ezra Taft Benson's stern warning to Brigham Young
University students to avoid unwholesome music, art, and clothing, and never to criticize Church leaders.
 265

Department agreed that BYU could segregate on-campus housing by sex, and the Church

conceded that it would not demand that off-campus landlords do the same.110 As late as

1990, BYU students were engaged in an attempt to reform the school's restrictive dress

code, which banned "shorts, sweatpants, sockless feet, long hair and beards"—all of

which, one reporter noted, were "commonplace on most university campuses."111 While

the school made some concessions, the BYU dress code remained one of the strictest in

the country. The Mormons, it appeared to many onlookers, were preventing their

young people from enjoying contemporary fashions and from freely expressing

themselves.

The Mormon influence was so strong throughout the Mormon community, Utah,

and much of the intermountain West, many argued, that the idea that anything went on in

the region or among Mormons without Church consent was ludicrous. As Dorothy Alfred

Solomon, daughter of the murdered fundamentalist Prophet Rulon Alfred, argued,

polygamy persisted in the early twentieth century with the full knowledge and consent of

the Church leadership, who continued blessing polygamous unions in secret long after

Wilford Woodruffs Manifesto. Once political considerations forced them to stop doing

so, she said, they turned on the polygamous communities they had secretly fostered: "The

official Church had hired detectives and assigned members to infiltrate the scattered

group of fundamentalists with the purpose of gathering information that would insure

110
"U.S. Asserts School Violates Housing Act," New York Times, March 5, 1978; "Mormon
School Gains Agreement on Housing," New York Times, June 11, 1978.
111
"Brigham Young: Students Fight a Dress Code from the '60s," New York Times, December 16,
1990.
112
Brigham Young: Rules on Dress Are Relaxed in Honor Code," New York Times, March 17,
1991.
 266

excommunication and imprisonment." The Church, she argued, would go to any

lengths—including persecuting its most devout followers for continuing practices it had

encouraged—for political expediency.

Mystery novelist Robert Irvine agreed. In the first of his popular Moroni Traveler

detective novels (Traveler is, improbably with such a name, a Gentile), polygamy

persisted in Church territory because the Church did nothing to stop it. "[T]he church had

influence enough to stop just about anybody or anything if it had a mind to," Traveler

believed.114 In Irvine's story, Church leadership purposefully stood aside and allowed a

grief-stricken member of the Council of Seventy—one of its highest ruling bodies—to

murder a fundamentalist leader. The killing conveniently rid the Church of the

embarrassment of one polygamous community while allowing the institution to keep its

hands clean. Thus while the contemporary Church no longer maintained a posse of

Danites, in living's telling, it continued to benefit from members' violence against those

who disobeyed the leadership to control members' and dissidents' behavior.

On social issues of national import, however, the Church actively and openly

galvanized members to work against liberal legislation like the Equal Rights Amendment.

According to Mormon leaders, the ERA endangered the family unit—the sacred

foundation of Mormon theology and community—and therefore members had a religious

duty to defeat any such legislation that would encourage women to leave the home. The

Church's opposition and its followers adherence to that position were so widely accepted

that the New York Times declared the faith and feminism virtually incompatible:

113
In My Father's House (New York: Watts, 1984), 12.
114
Baptism for the Dead (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1988), 15.
"Mormons for E.R.A.? How about Astronauts for a Flat Earth?" When feminist Sonia

Johnson, founder of Mormons for ERA, persisted in her public support for the

amendment, the Church excommunicated her for disobeying Church authorities and

publicly undermining the Church's programs—and the national press had a field day.116

Feminist Mary Daly used Johnson as a positive example of the power of one woman to

disrupt the patriarchal status quo in her book Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist

Philosophy}11 Another feminist scholar, anthropologist Evelyn Reed, counted the

Mormons as part of an "unholy alliance" against issues important to the feminist political

agenda that also included "the Catholic Church's male hierarchy," the Ku Klux Klan, and

the John Birch Society. Critics viewed the Mormon community as almost wholly

unified in obedience to the Church leadership in temporal matters where, many

Americans agreed, churches had no business.

As the gay rights movement picked up steam in the 1970s, the Mormon stance

against homosexuality—which one Church leader called an addiction—also drew fire.119

In 1979 BYU garnered national attention when it admitted, in response to accusations by

the ACLU, that campus police had staked out gay bars in Salt Lake City in an effort to

115
"Headliners: Divided Loyalty," New York Times, November 18, 1979. See also Barbara
Lichtenstein, "Paradox in Women's Movement: Feminists Who Are Mormons," New York Times, October
28, 1975.
116
See, for example, "Mormon Tribunal to Try Feminist on Rights Drive," New York Times,
November 18, 1979; Karen DeWitt, "The Pain of Being a Mormon Feminist," New York Times, November
27, 1979; "Suit Challenges Mormons on Trial of Rights Advocate," New York Times, December 1, 1979;
Ben A. Franklin, "Mormon Church Excommunicates a Supporter of Rights Amendment," new York Times,
December 6, 1979.
117
Demaris Wehr, "Fracturing the Language of Patriarchy," New York Times, July 22, 1984.
118
Judy Klemesrud, "Complacency on Abortion: A Warning to Women," New York Times,
January 23, 1978.
119
"Mormon Church Elder Calls Homosexuality an Addiction," New York Times, April 6,1981.
 268

identify students who might be gay.120 Gay former Mormon Emmett Foster made

headlines with Emmett: A One Mormon Show, "about a free spirit bridled by a Mormon

upbringing," in New York in the mid-1980s .121 And the television movie The Education

of Admiral Watkins dramatized for a national audience the pain that the Mormon

exclusion of homosexuals brought to real families forced to choose between their loved
1 -yy

ones and their religion: "I love my son. [...] I love my religion. They don't mix."

Liberal Americans were horrified by the Church's apparent willingness to condemn

people and destroy families for human behaviors it labeled sinful.

But more than the Church's political interference— its apparent suppression of

individual members' freedom of expression—galvanized public opinion. Mormon leaders

frequently made headlines when they warned members against criticizing the Church and

its leadership in any particular. The press especially bridled when these warnings

extended to intellectuals engaging in academic research, as when Gordon B. Hinckley,

then a member of the First Presidency and later the Prophet, declared at one of the

Church's semi-annual conferences, "When we are called before God to account for our

lives, I think it unlikely that any of us will be commended for wearing out our lives in an

effort to find some morsel of history, incomplete in its context, to cast doubt on this

work."123 In short, those who would question the leadership's interpretation of Mormon

theology and history—beware. American suspicions about Mormon intolerance for

120
"Brigham Young U. Admits Stakeouts on Homosexuals," New York Times, September 27,
1979.
121
Walter Kerr, "An Enquiry into the Vanishing Ending," New York Times, June 19, 1983.
122
Walter Goodman, "2 Personal Perspectives on AIDS," rev. The Education of Admiral Watkins,
New York Times, February 28, 1989.
123
"Mormon Leader Warns Members on Criticism," New York Times, October 6, 1985. See also
Iver Peterson, "Police Name 2d Suspect in Salt Lake City Bombings," New York Times, October 20, 1985.
freedom of thought were confirmed when in 1993 several Mormon academics were

denied tenure at BYU, disfellowshipped, or excommunicated, primarily for advancing

arguments for the right of Mormon women to hold the priesthood.124 Though the number

of people sanctioned was small, the message was loud and clear to non-Mormons: the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint will not tolerate dissent from the leadership's

position on issues of gender, sexuality, or personal behavior. But sanctions against

individuals hardly seemed the worst of the Church's punishment. Once again, the Church

appeared to be holding members hostage using access to the all-important temple. But

even worse, according to the television documentary The Mormons: Missionaries to the

World, the Church taught members that a person's sins not only affected the individual's

afterlife, but their family members' as well. In short, if you misbehaved you were not just

hurting yourself, but everyone you loved as well—now and for all eternity.125

But while the Saints' money and organizational savvy combined with threats of

physical and spiritual isolation apparently kept most Mormons in line with the Church

leadership's views, in one prominent case the Church's stringent controls seemed to

backfire in every way. Throughout the early 1980s, Mormon documents dealer Mark

Hofmann produced spectacular, previously unknown historical materials relating to the

Church's history. At first, the documents confirmed official Mormon accounts of the

Church's origins. But soon Hofmann began presenting the Church with documents that

124
See Anthony DePalma, "Faith and Free Speech Wrestle for Dominance in BYU Case," New
York Times, March 10, 1993; "Academic Freedom Is Raised As an Issue in Denials of Tenure," New York
Times, June 11, 1993; "Mormons Penalize Dissident Members: 6 Who Criticized Leaders or Debated
Doctrine Await Sanctions by Church," New York Times, September 19, 1993; Dirk Johnson, "As Mormon
Church Grows, So Does Dissent from Feminists and Scholars," New York Times, October 2, 1993.
125
Bobbie Birleffi, dir. (Seattle, WA: KCTS-TV, 1986).
 270

could undermine the very foundations of the faith: evidence contradicting Joseph Smith's

accounts of his prophetic visions and connecting early developments in Mormonism with

popular folk magic and treasure-digging practices of the period. The Church hurriedly

acquired the good and the bad, hoping, some suspected, to keep documents that

contradicted official Mormon teachings out of the public eye. But then Hofmann, who

had in fact forged all of the documents, murdered two people in 1985 in an effort to cover

up his forgeries. The ensuing investigation uncovered not only Hofmann's crimes, but

also the Church's efforts to control information and thereby its members. Writers were

fascinated by "the atmosphere within which his crimes took root and flowered. This, of

course, was the atmosphere created by the Mormon Church."126 This atmosphere, many

argued, was one in which the Church was driven by "an obsessive need to control the
1 -yn

past (so that they might control the future)."

The Hofmann case was a national sensation. Extensive newspaper coverage and

several true-crime books focused not primarily on the murders but rather on the forgeries

that, it turned out, Hofmann had crafted to destroy his own Church. Enraged by what he

saw as the Church's manipulation of information about its early history in order to

control members, Hofmann carefully designed his forgeries to undermine the most basic

tenets of the Mormon faith. He then beat the Church leadership at what he regarded (and

many reporters later agreed) as their own game, convincing them to pay him for the

fakes. According to many accounts, the Church bought the documents in order to hide
126
John Katzenbach, "Doubting the Prophet," rev. A Gathering of Saints: A True Story of Money,
Murder and Deceit by Robert Lindsey (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988) and The Mormon Murders: A
True Story of Greed, Forgery, Deceit, and Death by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith (New York:
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988), New York Times, October 9, 1988.
 271

them away. They explained the Church's public release of controversial documents by

claiming that the hierarchy's plans to keep the documents secret were foiled when

Hofmann surreptitiously released the damaging contents of his fakes to the public.128

Books with juicy titles like A Gathering of Saints: A True Story of Money, Murder and

Deceit and New York Times-bestseller The Mormon Murders: A True Story of Greed,

Forgery, Deceit, and Death explained in detail that Hofmann "was driven by a rage

against the church rooted in angry feelings of disillusionment and betrayal" inspired by

the Church's long practice of obscuring its own history. These authors concluded that

Mark Hofmann's forgeries—of which his murders were a direct result—were an effort to

punish the institution that he believed controlled his life and the life of all Mormons.

Further, they asserted, the Church's control of information, which Hofmann sought to

punish them for, enabled his crimes. The Church, many non-Mormons continued to

believe, exerted near-total control over members economically, politically, and

intellectually. Those who tried to break free, by whatever means, suffered mightily for it.

American Mormons: "an earlier, Norman Rockwell America"130

The split in Mormonism's public image in the late-twentieth century was most

obvious in positive representations of the Church and its adherents. Conservative

128
A small sampling of the media coverage includes Iver Peterson, "Police Name 2d Suspect in
Salt Lake City Bombings," New York Times, October 20, 1985; Iver Peterson, "Mormon Puzzle: Bombs
and Documents," New York Times, November 6, 1985; Robert Lindsey, "Extortion by Forgery Given As
Motive in Utah Murders," New York Times, February 16, 1986; James Coates, "Murder, Forgery Case
Shakes Foundation of Mormonism," Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1986; James Coates, "Mormons Close Tale
of Murder, Forgery," Chicago Tribune, August 9, 1987.
129
Naifeh and Smith, 391.
130
Bart, "The Mormon Nation."
 272

Americans continued to celebrate the Mormons wholesome, ail-American family-

oriented image. Liberals, on the other hand, criticized that image as too restricted and

restrictive, pointing out that it celebrated white, middle-class, male-dominated

heterosexual families to the exclusion of all others. They looked further back into the

controversial parts of the Mormon past that the Latter-day Saints had largely left

behind—at the demand of the American majority—in the nineteenth century,

highlighting the communal economic values and the alternative sexual and family

practices that made the Mormons unique during their first century in the United States.

Mirroring the growing disjunction between the dominant images of America,

representations of Mormon split between the ultimate cultural conservatives and their

nineteenth-century past as the nation's ultimate outsiders.

While no one argued by the beginning of this period that Mormons had fully

entered the American mainstream, observers agreed that the Saints had assumed "an

accepted place at the margin of conventional institutions."131 Many readily acknowledged

"a difference of customs," but in general the Mormons were regarded as a fixture in the

wider American society.132 But some believed that the remaining sense of difference that

existed between the Mormons and the mainstream spurred the Saints to try to distinguish

themselves. As one writer noted in a story on the Brigham Young University football

team, "Some Mormons will readily concede that a wish to shine in public is also rooted

in a desire to erase the storms over polygamy in the church's distant past and its refusal to

131
Paul Delaney, "Waiting for Radical Change," New York Times, January 13, 1974.
132
Paul L. Montgomery, "Mormons Trade Hills for Skyscrapers in Spreading Faith," New York
Times, November 17, 1970.
until recent years to admit blacks to the priesthood." To many, the Saints exhibited a

quest for overachievement in any arena that was both highly visible and highly valued in

the wider American culture, from the boardroom to the gridiron.

Despite a general abatement in the American fascination with the Old West,

Mormon pioneer history continued to serve the Saints well in the eyes of the American

public. Americans celebrated "the sacred, the scenic, and the historic" in the Mormon

past at sites like Nauvoo. The Church's restoration of the city on the Mississippi was, to

one laudatory observer, a "memorial to a highly advanced frontier civilization" and "an

example of cooperative effort, ingenuity and enduring faith."134 Wilford Woodruff, the

last prophet to openly condone polygamy, received his due as a figure paramount in the

history of the frontier in an episode of Westering, a television documentary series

produced by a Yale professor of American history.135 And in 1969, the nation celebrated

the centenary of the transcontinental railroad, which Mormon workers had helped build,

with ceremonies at Promontory Point, Utah, featuring an invocation by Mormon

President Harold B. Lee and a performance by the Tabernacle Choir. Clearly, the

Saints' role in taming the American frontier, divorced from their more controversial

beliefs and practices during the period, remained one of their biggest selling points with

the wider American public.

3
Iver Peterson, "Brigham Young Has All the Proof It Needs That It's No. 1," New York Times,
December 1, 1984.
134
Klein, "Nauvoo, the Town the Mormons Left."
135
Les Brown, "Professor at Yale Will Make Westerns for Television," New York Times, April 6,
1976.
136
Robert E. Bedingfield, "Rail Spanning of Nation in 1869 Is Observed," New York Times, May
11, 1969.
 274

Perhaps the most successful iteration of this image between 1966 and 1993 was

John D. Fitzgerald's children's book The Great Brain. First published in 1969 and

followed by several sequels, the popular books featured drawings by the famed children's

illustrator Mercer Mayer. Fitzgerald, the author of family memoir Papa Married a

Mormon (1955), based the stories on his experiences growing up the child of a Catholic

father and a Mormon mother in Utah in the late-nineteenth century. Like his earlier

memoir, Fitzgerald's children's stories emphasized the tolerance and friendship that he

said characterized relationships between people of all backgrounds in southern Utah

during his childhood. The Church is a clear presence throughout the book, with

characters regularly identified as Mormon and Church institutions such as the Zion's

Cooperative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI) making appearances in the story. But in The

Great Brain Fitzgerald focused on telling young readers that people are people, in spite

of surface differences like religion or nationality, and they should all be treated alike

according to their merits as individuals. He noted that "Mormons and non-Mormons had
i -in

learned to live together with some degree of tolerance and understanding by that time."

The social dynamics of neighborhood kids, in particular, had little to do with religion.

Instead, seniority was based on toughness and skill in typical boys' games: "After all,

there is nothing as tolerant and understanding as a kid you can whip."13 In Fitzgerald's

celebration of American tolerance, religious affiliation played little role in day-to-day life

of this Mormon-dominated frontier community.

137
(New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1969; New York: Puffin Books, 2004), 1-2. All
citations from the 2004 edition.
138
2.
 275

The Great Brain made its way to television in 1978 as a vehicle for Donny and

Marie Osmond's younger brother Jimmy. Broadcast by ABC, the film eliminated nearly

every reference to Mormons (although for many viewers the Utah setting and Osmond

production and casting would have been enough to peg the main characters as Saints),

undoubtedly in an effort to avoid controversy. For the most part the story does not suffer,

because Fitzgerald had made sure that his book did not make an issue out of Mormonism

one way or the other. But when several boys decide to get rid of a hateful school teacher,

they frame him as a heavy drinker and plant empty whiskey bottles in the trash pile of a

neighbor of the teacher's boarding house. The neighbor, upon finding the bottles,

declares to the landlady, "You and your boarders are the only people on the block who

aren't Mormons." Ergo the whiskey bottle must have come from the boarding house,

because Mormons do not drink. In the end, the one reference that survived the adaptation

from page to screen referred not so much to the Saints' religion but to their clean living—

an aspect of Mormonism that many Americans regarded as innocuous and one that

conservatives heartily admired.139

Perhaps the most unexpected forum for the Mormons' oft-discussed clean living

was reporting on the life and death of the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Hughes

favored Mormons—"that steady, straight-living, efficient breed"—as personal attendants

because they did not smoke or drink and he believed them to be thoroughly upright and

honest.140 Hughes' preference for Mormons as companions was so well known that when

139
Sidney Levin, dir, The Great Brain. Starring Jimmy Osmond (USA: National Broacasting
Corporation [NBC], 1978).
140
J. Anthony Lukas, "The Bennett Mystery," New York Times, January 29, 1976. See also "Life
of Howard Hughes Was Marked by a Series of Bizarre and Dramatic Events," New York Times, April 6,
 276

he died, the purported will that was taken the most seriously in the courts out of the

dozens produced all over the country was one that turned up in the Salt Lake City

headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The so-called "Mormon

Will," which made headlines throughout the late 1970s, left a substantial portion of

Hughes' estate to the Church, but courts in Texas and Nevada eventually declared the

document a fraud produced by another named beneficiary.141 That man's story—and

Hughes' reputed fondness for the Mormons—eventually made its way to the big screen

in the Oscar-winning 1980 film Melvin and Howard, starring Jason Robards and Mary

Steenburgen.142

Americans' opinions mirrored Hughes' with regard not only to the Mormons'

drinking habits, but also their work ethic and business savvy. When Nixon named George

Romney, the former head of the American Motors Corporation and Governor of

Michigan, as his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in 1968, The New York

Times noted that he carried the "idealism of his Mormon religion to business and politics

and general."143 Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of the television, was touted as the

ultimate self-made man—"truly the Horatio Alger epic"—when the United States

announced the release of a commemorative stamp in his honor in 1983.144 And J. Willard

Marriott, founder of the Marriott hotel chain, was hailed throughout the period as a model

1976; "Ex-Wife Says Hughes Planned to Leave Fortune to Aid Medical Research," New York Times, April
23, 1978; Garson Kanin, "There's a Pink Hotel..." New York Times, October 7, 1984.
141
See Wallace Turner, "Purported Will of Hughes Found at Mormon Office," New York Times,
April 30, 1976, and "Jury Finds Supposed Mormon Will of Hughes a Fake," New York Times, June 9,
1978.
142
Jonathan Demme, dir. (USA: Universal Pictures, 1980).
143
"Housing."
144
Samuel A. Tower, "Commemoratives Honor Four Inventors," New York Times, September 18,
1983.
 277

American businessman: hard-working, fair-minded, and very, very successful.145 Many

Americans would have agreed with a letter to the editor that, in 1972, praised the

Mormons as "sober, law-abiding, industrious residents" and "a credit to any community

lucky enough to have them."146 Religious and political peculiarities aside, individual

Mormons made good next-door neighbors.

Americans generally respected Mormon piety when not confronted with too many

specifics of their faith, and the media praised Mormon missionaries and religious

education centers throughout the period. Such evidence of youth involvement in religious

activities was to be envied, not denigrated.147 Mormon youth were also associated with

ecumenical organizations like the nascent Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the

1970s. The result was the kind of young people every American parent hoped they

would produce: superachievers.149 In the 1980s there was a vogue on the East Coast for

hiring Mormon girls from Utah as live in nannies because, as one Mormon bishop noted,

"They have a good reputation, and most uphold the standards of the church—no

smoking, no drinking. Word has gotten out."150

145
See Reed, "Chief Planner for Inauguration," and William G. Blair, "J. Willard Marriott Is Dead
at 84; Built Hotel and Restaurant Chain," New York Times, August 15, 1985.
146
Letter to the Editor, New York Times, December 23, 1972.
147
Paul L. Montgomery, "Mormons Trade Hills for Skyscrapers in Spreading Faith," New York
Times, November 17, 1970; Edward B. Fiske, "Italy Is Less Hostile to Busy Mormon Mission," New York
Times, November 20, 1971; Judy Klemesrud, "Strengthening Family Solidarity with a Family Home
Evening Program," New York Times, June 4, 1973; Jo-Ann Price, "'Seminary' Meets at 6 A.M.," New York
Times, July 8, 1973; "Brigham Young: A Special Style, On and Off the Field," New York Times, November
6, 1983; "Braving World and Big City, Missionaries Go Forth," New York Times, September 15,1991.
148
"The Fellowship of Christian Athletes: A Love Cult That Continues to Grow," New York
Times, August 22, 1971.
149
Barbara Campbell, "A Jersey Teenager Is a Superachiever," New York Times, June 11, 1975.
150
Carol Steinberg, "Mormon Nannies in Demand on L.I.," New York Times, December 1, 1985.
 But the standard-bearer of the Saints' conservative all-American image was still

the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It regularly performed at presidential inaugurations and

national celebrations, serenading the country with numbers like "Song of Democracy,"

"This Is My Country," and the national anthem.151 When historians rediscovered a

nineteenth-century hymn entitled "Liberty Enlightening the World," dedicated by the

French to the United States and performed only once before in 1876, the Mormon

Tabernacle Choir performed it first.152 When Americans waxed rhapsodic on their

musical tradition, the Choir was the exemplar: "Americans have had a great musical

tradition. Music, we are told, is an international language. One can but think of the

everlasting and immortal contributions to world music that we Americans have made.

One thinks of 'God Bless America' especially as sung by the Mormon Tabernacle

Choir."153

Such fame could not but draw fire, and in the 1970s the cracks in the Choir's

facade—or the split widening between the right and the left in American culture—started

to show. Noting that audiences were getting bored with the old bag of tricks, one pair of

rock promoters declared, "we gave them what they want: the Mormon tabernacle choir

doing obscene gestures in unison."154 Comedian Andy Kaufman mocked the controversy

over the Saints' policies on blacks in the priesthood by announcing special guests at a

151
Harold C. Schonberg, "Inaugural Concerts: Americana vs. All-American," New York Times,
January 20, 1969; "Inauguration Program," New York Times, January 20, 1969; and
152
Nan Robertson, "U.S. Premiere for Hymn to Statue of Liberty," New York Times, February 28,
1985.
153
Harold B. Schonberg, "Ladies Auxiliary of the Chaminade Society, Arise!," New York Times,
October 18, 1970.
154
Dan Karlinsky and Edwin Goldgood, '"Boy, That's Foresight,'" New York Times, March 8,
1970.
 279

show at Carnegie Hall and then bringing out what The New York Times described as "a

largely black delegation from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir."155 And the beat poet

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in "Dreams of a New Beginning," imagined a fresh start for the

nation as "[t]he seas come in over Utah/ Mormon Tabernacles washed away like

barnacles."156 The choir was, for Ferlinghetti, an encrustation that only the power of the

seas could dislodge, and an essential part of wiping the nation's slate clean to start anew.

"America's Choir" served as a convenient stand-in for critics of the conservative

American values the Mormons represented.

But liberals did not denigrate every aspect of Mormonism. Rather, they looked to

an earlier period in the Saints' history and highlighted the Mormon struggle to live their

beliefs in spite of the opposition of mainstream America's conservative moral strictures.

The reviewer of a biography of beat poet Allen Ginsberg—a challenger of the status quo

if ever there was one—declared the homosexual iconoclast the heir of "Whitman and the

founders of communal groups from Oneida to New Harmony, from the Schwenkfelders

to the Mormons, those noble souls who almost won, who almost established America as a

community of love."157 Carol Lynn Pearson, in her family memoir Goodbye, I Love You,

described her struggle to build a new kind of family with the man to whom she had been

sealed for time and eternity in the temple after he revealed that he was gay and wanted to

live his sexuality honestly. Pearson ended her book with her husband's death of AIDS,

155
Janet Maslin, "Comedy: Andy Kaufman Fills Stage with Parade of Odd Characters," April 28,
1979.
155
Reprinted from Who Are We Now?, New York Times, March 17, 1976.
157
Kenneth Rexroth, "Allen Ginsberg As Winnie-the-Pooh, Gary Snyder as Japhy Ryder," rev. of
Allen Ginsberg's America by Jane Kramer (New York: Random House, 1969), New York Times, May 11,
1969.
describing her certainty that she and her husband would be rejoined in the afterlife in

keeping with their marriage "for eternity." She turned to the nineteenth-century Mormon

understanding of God as a married being to commend him "to our Father and Mother in

Heaven." In 1988, excommunicated Mormon bishop Antonio Feliz published Out of

the Bishop's Closet, in which he argued that contemporary Mormon teachings against

homosexuality were in fact in direct opposition to the openness of the early Church. He

went so far as to argue, based on research in the Church's archives in Salt Lake City

(completed prior to his excommunication), that Joseph Smith himself had sealed men to

one another.159 Even Tony Kushner, who scathingly critiqued contemporary Mormonism

in Angels in America, openly admired the Church's radical nineteenth-century social

experiments.16 Liberals, too, celebrated Mormonism, but a very different version from

that admired by their conservative counterparts.

Historian R. Laurence Moore analyzed the seeming contradictions between

Mormonism in the nineteenth century and the late twentieth:

What, after all, were the principles of cooperation that explained the
success of Mormon communities in the nineteenth century? A short list
includes an emphasis on self-help and self-reliance, a deference to
authority, a strong preference for local control, an insistence on privately
administered charity based on traditional group ties, and an aversion to
any sort of social legislation engineered in Washington. These are the very
principles that form the core of Mormonism's alleged conservatism in the
present day. What has changed arguably are not the deep-seated values of

158
(New York: Random House, 1986), 225.
159
Out of the Bishop's Closet: A Call to Heal Ourselves, Each Other, and Our World (San
Francisco, CA: Aurora Press, 1988; San Francisco, CA: Alamo Press, 1992).
160
"Tony Kushner Considers the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness," American
Theatre (October 1994), 103.
 Mormon culture but the political label that many people want to attach to
them.161

In short, the Mormons had not changed: the rest of America had. What Moore

failed to note was the Mormons had, under pressure from the wider culture,

hewed strongly to only those of their social values that Americans came to regard

as conservative. But at the same time, they maintained some of the most

distinctive aspects of their theology, deeply rooted in their radical nineteenth-

century past. As the nation fractured under the pressure of the culture wars, so too

did its image of the Latter-day Saints: conservatives rejected Mormon theology

while embracing its social and political commitments (and tacitly accepting its

methods in deploying those values); liberals applauded the Saints' theological

transgressions while condemning them for their social and political values. In

both cases, American observers isolated specific aspects of Mormonism from one

another, praising what they wanted to see more of in America as a whole and

condemning what they wanted to eliminate from the culture. Americans almost

never dealt with the Saints as complicated people or their faith as a diverse

community. And because images of the Saints split along the fault lines in the

wider culture, as the millennium approached no one was entirely happy with the

Mormons.

161
R. Laurence Moore, "How to Become a People: The Mormon Scenario," Religious Outsiders
and the Makings ofAmericans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 44.
 282

Chapter 6

Searching for Middle Ground:

Imagining Mormons As Real People, 1993-2008

Mormons showed up far less in print news during the 1990s. But unlike the

middle of the twentieth century, when reporters handled the Mormons with kid gloves in

an effort to bolster the image of American national unity in the face of the Cold War, this

change did not signal avoidance so much as a simple lack of interest. This was due in part

to the fact that the Mormons no longer served as exemplars of conservative social and

especially political values. During the 1980s, Latter-day Saint leaders spoke out strongly

against President Reagan's plan to base nuclear missiles in the intermountain West.1

Senator Orrin Hatch, the primary Mormon face on the national political stage, further

weakened the image of Mormons in lockstep with conservative politics, steadfastly

refusing to support legislation mandating school prayer and making common cause with

Democrats to increase governmental health insurance for children.2 By 1990, Hatch,

once described as one of "the New Right's true believers"—perhaps too conservative for
n

even Reagan—had earned a reputation as one of the Senate's great compromise builders.

The media remained interested in polygamy, however, and after 2000 news coverage of
1
"Mormon Church Opposes Placing MX Missiles in Utah and Nevada," New York Times, May 6,
1981. Unless otherwise noted, all citations to The New York Times in this chapter are from the LexisNexis
Academic database. Accessed via the Boston University Libraries, online at http://www.bu.edu/libraries.
2
On school prayer see Steven R. Roberts, '"Social Issues' Reheated to Warm Up the G.O.P.,"
New York Times, June 5, 1983; on health care, see Irving Molotsky, "This Odd Couple Focuses on Health,"
New York Times, September 14, 1984.
3
Hatch was rightly seen as part of the conservative tide that rolled into Washington during the
1970s and culminated with Reagan's election to the presidency in 1980 (see Peter Ross Range, "Thunder
from the Right: President Reagan May Find It Hard to Be Conservative Enough for Senator Jesse Helms
and the New Right's True Believers," New York Times, February 8, 1981). But ten years later, he was
viewed as a bridge builder between the parties in Congress (Neil A. Lewis, "Washington Week: Orrin
Hatch's Journey: Strict Conservative to Compromise Seeker," New York Times, March 2, 1990).
 283

the Saints in politics revived when Mormons once again forayed onto the national scene

with Mitt Romney's campaign for the presidency and the Church's outspoken support of

bans on gay marriage during the 2008 campaign season. But while the media looked

away from the Saints for at least part of this period, the Mormons' reputation did not fare

as well elsewhere in American culture. From 1993 to 2008, the Mormons continued to

appear in books, on television, and in major Hollywood movies as credulous fools, sexual

deviants, violent zealots, and the minions of Church leaders in Salt Lake City.

The biggest change in this period came in positive images of the Saints, as the

wholesome, clean-cut image favored by conservatives came under greater suspicion and

the liberal take on Mormons that surfaced after 1966 gained favor in the wider culture. At

the beginning of the twenty-first century, representations of good American Mormons

increasingly embraced unique Mormon theology (albeit lampooning it along the way)

while rejecting the Church's conservative social proscriptions. But as before, to be good

Americans, Mormons were expected to divorce belief and practice, saving their religion

for church and putting it away in the public sphere. Americans' expectations about what

was appropriate within those categories had changed since the late nineteenth century,

but their demand that the Saints separate the two remained largely the same.

The most startling change in this period was the appearance of a number of

representations that complicated the American image of the Saints. Rather than viewing

the Mormons through a narrow lens or looking at only narrow slices of their beliefs,

practices, or history, a number of prominent American representations during this period

examined positive and negative aspects of Mormonism side-by-side. Such observers of

the Mormons criticized what they saw as bad, admired what they saw as good, and

sometimes mocked what they saw as silly—all at the same time. For some Americans,

the Mormons were finally starting to look like complicated human beings—just like

anybody else.

Religion: "We're not a weird people."4

In the late twentieth century, as more and more Americans worried less about

other people's souls than their individual fulfillment in this world, Mormon theology

looked no less bizarre and, to some, no less dangerous. For conservative Protestant

Christians, saving the Mormons from their religion remained a priority, and evangelicals

especially continued to generate "educational" materials for their members that combined

warnings against Mormonism with instructions on how to convert individuals from

Mormonism to "true" Christianity. But liberals, too, warned against Mormonism's

dangers, focusing not on the Mormons' eternal souls but rather on the dangerous

influence of foolish Mormon doctrines in people's lives in the here-and-now. Everything

from Mormon missionary practices to their belief in angels and to their underwear was

minutely examined and found amusing or threatening—and sometimes both

simultaneously. Church President Gordon B. Hinckley knew exactly what most

Americans thought of his religion when he insisted to interviewer Mike Wallace in 1996,

"We're not a weird people."

4
Gordon B. Hinckley, interview by Mike Wallace, "An Interview with Gordon Hinckley," 60
Minutes, CBS, February 3,2008. Original air date April 7, 1996. Online at www.cbsnews.com.
 285

Missionaries often served in this period, as in others, as the entry-point for a

discussion of Mormon beliefs. The New York Times, for instance, occasionally profiled

missionaries working in the New York City area. One such article, published in 1994,

treated the missionaries gently if somewhat quizzically, explaining their successes as a

product of the Church's middle-class American image: for many, the article noted,

Mormonism looked like a gateway from the margins to the mainstream in American

culture.5 But others saw such missionaries as a sinister presence. One author profiling life

in Russia as that nation tried to rebuild after the collapse of the Soviet Union viewed

Mormon missionaries as little better than snake-oil salesmen. They were simply one

example of the "new religions and faith healers" flooding the country, making eternal

promises to desperate people.6 A 1998 New York Times piece on missionaries also

emphasized the Church's success among the down-and-out, ending with the profile of a

recent convert who joined after a traumatic divorce.7 The article prompted an angry letter

to the editor from a gay former Mormon, who claimed that the Church's stance on

homosexuality "led me to near destruction, not to mention my ex-wife and children." A

teacher, the man wrote that he "was scared that this most dangerous cult is banging on the

doors of my students in the projects," targeting those in need in their efforts to fulfill the
Q

prophecy that "the Mormons are to 'fill the whole earth.'" Mormon missionaries were,

5
David Gonzalez, "Spreading the Word in the South Bronx: In a World Stripped of Luxuries,
Mormon Missionaries Help Faith Take Root," November 16, 1994.
6
Katrina vanden Heuvel, "Bread Lines," rev. Ordinary Life in the New Russia by Eleanor
Randolph (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), New York Times, June 23, 1996.
7
"Men on a Mission: The Mormon Church Finds New York Fertile Ground for Converts and a
Land of Temptation for Young Recruiters," May 31, 1998.
8
John Whiting, "Article on Mormons Raises Difficult Memories," June 28, 1998.
 286

for many, a sign of the Church's willingness to exploit vulnerable and ill-educated people

in their determination to take over the world.

Conservative evangelicals also warned about Mormon missionary success, but

their biggest concern was not the third world or the urban poor but mission fields much

closer to home: the Bible Belt. The Southern Baptist Convention, in preparation for their

1998 annual meeting, made a film on the Latter-day Saints. The Mormon Puzzle

explained the Saints' beliefs as understood from a conservative Protestant viewpoint in

detail in an effort to prove to its members that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day

Saints was not Christian. The mistake, the narrator intoned, was easy to make. After all,

the Mormons "make beautiful music, and talk about family values. They teach Christian

virtues, and witness to a faith in Jesus Christ. They love the gospel—as they believe it—

and follow a modern prophet. They claim to be Christians and call themselves Saints."

But, the film explained, when Mormons used Christian terminology to refer to God, Jesus

Christ, the Holy Spirit, scripture, and salvation, they referred to ideas that were

completely alien to true Christianity. They used familiar terms and images to put people

at ease, all the while leading them down "a path that will lead to eternal condemnation."

The Church fooled people into believing that they were Christians, when in fact if

Mormons would be "lost for eternity" unless they converted to true (evangelical)

Christianity. While The Mormon Puzzle used gentler language to condemn the Mormons

than The God Makers had been fifteen years before, it still labeled the religion a "non-

biblical, non-Christian counterfeit church." But the movie was more concerned with

saving evangelical Christians from converting than it was with saving Mormons from
their Church. The film repeatedly referred to the Church's missionary success in the

Bible Belt and among other Christian denominations, and specifically warned viewers

against engaging Mormon missionaries in religious discussions.9 The film was simply

trying to save Baptists and other evangelicals from the trap of false Mormon doctrine.

Mormon belief in an ultimately literal and physical afterlife, where men and

women lived and had sex and produced children, seemed to many to be improbable,

unprovable, and frankly ludicrous. Mike Wallace, veteran reporter for CBS's 60 Minutes,

frequently expressed such doubts during a rare interview with media-sawy Church

President Gordon B. Hinckley in 1996. Wallace approached the most foundational

Mormon story—Joseph Smith's First Vision in 1820—by facing Hinckley squarely and

asking with eyebrows raised, "Seriously?" After Hinckley asserted, "We're not a weird

people," the story cut immediately to Wallace's discussion of sacred temple

undergarments. The Mormons' belief that Missouri was the site of the Garden of Eden

and is destined to be the site of Christ's Second Coming was, to Wallace, "another

peculiarity." In each case, Wallace highlighted Latter-day Saint beliefs based on biblical

literalism and the physical nature of ultimate reality, and neatly dismissed them as silly.

The interview ended with Wallace looking at Hinckley in front of a group of Mormon

onlookers and saying, "I've thought about it. I've not been able to persuade myself."

While Hinckley's recovery was nothing short of masterful—a chuckle followed by,

"Then you haven't thought about it long enough!"—the message was clear. Wallace was

The Mormon Puzzle: Understanding and Witnessing to Latter-day Saints (USA: Southern
Baptist Convention, 1998). The New York Times discussed the film in the context of its coverage of the
Southern Baptist Convention meeting at Salt Lake City. See "Fundamental Differences," May 31, 1998.
 288

not convinced by all of the irrational Mormon hocus pocus he had encountered, and

furthermore he had no desire to be. Wallace did not describe any aspect of Mormonism as

inspiring or intriguing. He presented the Saints' religion as both unbelievable and equally

unappealing.10

The popular animated television series South Park took up the question of Smith's

First Vision in 2003. Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone answered Wallace's quizzical,

"Seriously?," with a resounding "NO!" In an episode entitled "All about the Mormons?,"

a Mormon family moves into Parker and Stone's fictional Colorado town. The super-nice

Saints quickly befriend local boy Stan and, when Stan comes over for family home

evening and starts asking questions, they explain the origins of their religion to him. The

story of Smith's early visions and his discovery and translation of the Book of Mormon is

told in a series of musical flashbacks, during which an unseen chorus persistently sings,

"dum dum dum dum dum." While the chorus might sound like nonsense musical

syllables, Parker and Stone make their meaning clear when Smith allows scribe Martin

Harris to take home the working translation of the Book of Mormon to show his wife.

Mrs. Harris, not believing Smith's story, hides the pages and tells her husband to return

and ask Smith to retranslate the pages. Only if he can reproduce them exactly, she says, is

he a prophet. Here the chorus chimes in vigorously: "Lucy Harris smart, smart, smart!

Martin Harris dumb!" Stan is outraged that seemingly normal, intelligent people believe

such hogwash:

If you're gonna say things that have been proven wrong, like—that the
first man and woman lived in Missouri and that Native Americans came

10
Wallace, "An Interview with Gordon B. Hinckley."
 from Jerusalem, then you better have something to back it up! All you've
got are a bunch of stories about some asswipe who read plates nobody
ever saw out of a hat and then couldn't do it again when the translations
were hidden!

Like many before them, Parker and Stone dismiss Smith's supernatural visions as fictions

that fooled only the most credulous Americans.11

Perhaps Mike Wallace's attention to Mormon sacred temple garments was

inevitable after Deborah Laake's 1993 bestselling memoir focused so much attention on

them. According to religious studies scholar Colleen McDannell, the undergarments had

no simple explanation. Church leaders, she told readers in 1995, refused, because of the

garments' sacred nature, to discuss their history or contemporary meaning in any great

detail. Thus individual Mormons, she discovered through interviews with Saints and

former Saints who had worn the garments, became "silent theologians," interpreting the

garments' meaning and function for themselves.12 Like Wallace, McDannell drew

attention to the protective power that many Mormons believed resided in the garments.13

According to McDannell, Mormons spoke of temple garments protecting wearers from

physical harm, such as fire, and spiritual harm, like sexual misbehavior. While many of

the people McDannell interviewed expressed doubt about such protection stories, they

nevertheless related them. Such stories, McDannell argued, allowed individual Mormons

to explore the possibility that the garments did possess such powers while still expressing

11
Trey Parker and Matt Stone, dir. "All about the Mormons?" South Park, Comedy Central,
November 19, 2003. Online at www.southparkstudios.com.
12
McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1995), 199.
13
In Wallace's 60 Minutes piece, he interviewed several prominent Mormons in addition to
President Hinckley. Businessman Bill Marriott, the head of the Marriott hotel chain, spoke to Wallace
about his temple garments, relating a story in which the garments protected him from a fire after a boating
accident.
 290

modem, rational doubts that they did. While the people she interviewed expressed

varying opinions about the garments' meaning, they agreed that all good, active

Mormons wore them and, for active Church members, going without them left the wearer

feeling exposed and often guilty or ashamed. Whether they believed the garments

actually protected them from physical and spiritual harm, they were so attached to the

powerful symbol of their religion that they felt vulnerable without it. Thus the garments

became a locus of magical thinking for educated, intelligent people living in the modem

world.

Such magical thinking, according to comedian and talk show host Bill Maher, is

characteristic of all religion and is precisely the reason that religion must be done away

with for the good of humanity in the modem world. And among the world's religions,

Maher declared in his 2008 film Religulous, Mormonism is one of the most nonsensical:

"To be a Mormon is to believe some really crazy stuff. Crazy even by the standards of the

big religions." Using clips of the animated sequence from the 1982 evangelical

propaganda film The God Makers—without identifying the film, thus leaving viewers

open to misinterpret the clips as from a Mormon source—Maher outlined several of the

most peculiar sounding Mormon beliefs. The craziest of all? "Caffeine is evil, but magic

underwear can protect you." Text superimposed over an image of the torsos of a man and

a woman in temple garments explained: "Temple garments protect you from: Fire,

Knives, Bullets, Satan." Without making any effort to explain Mormon history or

theology to his viewers, Maher used classic anti-Mormon claims about the ridiculousness
 291

(or "rehgulousness") of some of the Saints' key beliefs to serve his argument that religion

as a whole was irrational and dangerous.14

But finally, such arguments about the wrongness or ridiculousness of Mormon

beliefs rested, at the beginning of the twenty-first century as at the end of the nineteenth,

on non-Mormon Americans' basic ignorance about Mormonism. When, in 1997,

professional basketball player Dennis Rodman was fined by the NBA for publicly using

vulgarities to refer to Mormons as a group, Rodman's coach defended him by saying that

Rodman did not know that the term "Mormons" referred to members of a religion.15 Ten

years later, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee took aim at Mitt Romney, his

opponent for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination and a Mormon, asking a New

York Times interviewer, "Don't Mormons [...] believe that Jesus and the devil are

brothers?"16 Huckabee had made his mark in the presidential race by calling himself the

Christian candidate, and this seemingly innocent question was well designed to make

conservative Christian Republican primary voters think twice about Romney. His query

was effective in frightening away voters precisely because of the balance of ignorance

and information about Mormonism in the United States more than one hundred and ten

years after the Saints abandoned polygamy and began Americanizing. At the beginning

of the twenty-first century, Americans' knowledge of Latter-day Saint beliefs continued

to be extremely limited and highly sensationalized, virtually guaranteeing that anyone

14
Bill Maher, dir. Religulous (USA: 2008).
15
Mike Wise, "N.B.A. Fines Rodman $50,000 for Remarks on Mormons," New York Times, June
13, 1997.
16
Zev Chafets, "The Huckabee Factor," December 16,2007.
 292

who heard Huckabee's comment would not be certain that he was right, but would likely

worry that he was.

Mormons and Sex: "way beyond hypocrisy"17

While during the 1980s polygamy was in some ways accepted as a form of

religious expression, no American would have called it respectable. Even monogamous

Mormon sexual practices were judged bizarre, repressive, abusive or, in some cases, all

of the above. And polygamy, to even the most sympathetic outside observers, was always

a system of patriarchal domination that denigrated women. Throughout this period, case

after prominent case of polygamists accused of forcing child brides into marriage seemed

to confirm that whatever their intentions, participants in plural marriage always teetered

on the edge of committing terrible abuses. Polygamy aside, mainstream Mormon sexual

mores appeared to socially moderate and liberal Americans to foster unhealthy repression

with potentially disastrous consequences. For non-Mormon Americans, the majority of

whom viewed the bedroom as no place for religious authorities, the variety of ways in

which Mormon belief interfered in members' sex lives looked intrusive and dangerous.

Throughout the 1990s, polygamy remained both an odd bit of Americana and a

joke. It was also firmly linked in American minds, despite Mormons' protestations, to the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Radio talk show host Don Imus quipped, for

example, that polygamy might be the answer to all of President Clinton's well-publicized

problems with adultery: "the President could combat charges of womanizing by

17
C. Jay Cox, dir. Latter Days, DVD (USA: TLA Releasing, 2003).
becoming a Mormon." When introducing the basic tenets of Mormonism to readers, a

New York Times writer, undoubtedly knowing how closely the Church was linked to

polylgamy in the popular imagination, ended his brief profile by explaining that

"Polygamy, once an accepted tenet of Mormonism, was repudiated in 1890."19 Mormon

filmmakers Jed Knudsen and Daryn Tufts illustrated this perception in their documentary

American Mormon (2005), visiting cities around the United States and interviewing

people on the street. They found that people routinely connected Mormons with

polygamy. One woman even suggested that the professional basketball team the Utah

Jazz should be renamed the Utah Polygamists.

Thus when The New York Times profiled polygamous families trying to live

average middle-class suburban lives, readers undoubtedly connected polygamists'

attitudes about women to those of the Church from which such fundamentalists had been

excommunicated.21 And how did the Times interpret that attitude for readers?

"[Vjernacular polygamous architecture," the writer informed readers, "reflects its own

social values, including a strong division of labor, the imperative to be fertile and a belief

in efficiency and strict child-rearing." Furthermore, "the houses reveal a major power

imbalance, somewhat like a traditional harem, reinforcing the relative mobility of the

man and the relative immobility of the women and their availability to him." Women,

then, were not just mothers and caretakers, but immobile homebound objects, there to

18
Maureen Dowd, "The Last Laugh," New York Times, March 24, 1996.
19
Andrew Jacobs, "The Roots of a Religion," May 31, 1998.
20
Jed Knudsen, dir. American Mormon (USA: Excel Entertainment Group, 2005).
21
In a letter to the editor, a Managing Director for the Church objected to the use of the term
"fundamentalist Mormons," arguing that people who practiced polygamy were excommunicated by the
official Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and therefore should not be called Mormons.
"Mormons and Polygamy," New York Times, December 18, 1997.
 294

please their owner-husband when he desired and to share in the care of all of his children

regardless of maternity. The article reinforced this impression by distinguishing between

"siblings" and "half-siblings" when it referred to the children of such marriages. One

polygamous husband who asked not to be named was initially labeled "the Man of the
•yy

House" and, in subsequent references, was called simply "the Man." Women and

children appeared both impersonal and interchangeable in this male-dominated world.

This arrangement took on a far more sinister appearance in the late 1990s, as the

nation and the world turned their eyes toward Utah in the lead-up to the 2002 Salt Lake

City Winter Olympics. While the state wanted the world to be seen as modem, friendly,

and open, Timothy Egan argued in The New York Times, there remained a hidden side of

Utah best described by Mark Twain (whose travelogue Roughing It Egan quoted out of

context) in the late-nineteenth century as "a land of enchantment and awful mystery."

Egan described modem polygamy much as past critics had described the official Church,

as "massive patriarchal cabals linked by bloodlines and business ties, whose members

generally tithe 10 percent of all wages and earnings to their church." Women, he argued,

were trapped in "indentured barbarism," subject to "a sexual rotation schedule with all

the romance of being a hen at a poultry ranch." Women who left fundamentalist groups

charged rampant sexual abuse, pedophilia, and incest: "This is organized crime, operating

under the cover of religion." But, according to Egan, Utah authorities persistently turned

a blind eye to the increasingly open practice of polygamy because of their own romantic

notions about plural marriage as practiced by their pioneer ancestors. The governor had
22
Florence Williams, "One House, Ten Wives: Polygamy in Suburbia," New York Times,
December 11, 1994.
 295

even suggested that he was not interested in prosecuting polygamists because plural

marriage was an exercise in religious freedom—a statement that critics, with whom Egan

agreed, vigorously denied. Utah, Egan concluded, needed to do something about

eliminating this holdover from the Dark Ages if it hoped to be accepted as modem and
>yi

respectable by the nation and the world.

Egan's came at the beginning of a wave of renewed interest in polygamous

fundamentalists' marital practices, and between 1999 and 2008 several cases against

polygamists were extensively reported in the national media. Egan's article named one

pair of fundamentalists, David O. Kingston and his brother John D. Kingston, who were

tried in 1999 after John's sixteen-year-old daughter called police and reported that her

father had savagely beaten her when she ran away from her uncle—who her father had

forced her to marry. Her uncle was later convicted of incest.24 The disappearance of

fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart from her Salt Lake City home in 2002 received

extensive national coverage. In March 2003, when authorities finally recovered Smart,

they discovered that her kidnapper David Brian Mitchell, who called himself Emmanuel

and believed he was a modem prophet, took her to be his plural wife. While much of the

coverage avoided tying Mitchell to the Church—he had been excommunicated years

before the kidnapping took place—several writers stated the connection. Calling Mormon

scriptures "ambiguous" on the subject of polygamy, one New York Times article ended by

noting that Smart's aunt, a Mormon in good standing, generally opposed the concept of

plural marriage but was willing to make exceptions. If anything ever happened to her
23
"The Persistence of Polygamy," February 28, 1999.
24
"Polygamist Is Convicted of Incest," New York Times, June 4, 1999.
 296

brother, she said, she had told her husband that she would "let him take care o f her

sister-in-law.25 Under the circumstances—her niece's recent rescue from a man who

justified kidnapping and rape in the name of plural marriage—Smart's comments seemed

ill-timed if not bizarre. But the point was clear: Even the most mainstream of Mormons

with every reason to oppose plural marriage could imagine circumstances under which

they would enter into the illegal and, to many, immoral practice.

Kidnapping and child abuse in the name of polygamy made for exciting reading,

and a succession of memoirs by women raised in polygamy were published after 2000.

Dorothy Alfred Solomon, who first wrote about her childhood in a polygamous family in

1984, returned to the subject in 2003 with Predators, Prey, and Other Kinfolk: Growing

Up in Polygamy. The book was retitled Daughter of the Saints for its paperback release in

2004, making the connection between polygamy and the Latter-day Saints more

explicit.26 The same year, Debbie Palmer related her tale of abuse in a fundamentalist

community in Keep Sweet: Children of Polygamy. According to Palmer, polygamous

communities taught children that whatever men did to women was right, and then left

unsupervised boys to rape and abuse the girls. Describing many scenes in excruciatingly

graphic detail, Palmer explained that the girls did not go to adults for help because they,

too, believed that men had the right to treat women and children as they pleased. In one

such scene, a teenage boy justified himself to a young girl he raped by telling her,

"Remember what the prophet says about Christ on the cross. You have to suffer like him.

Michael Janofsky, "Kidnapping Case Puts Mormons on Defensive," March 24, 2003.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003.
 297

I'm just teachin' you—so thank me."27 In 2008, Elissa Wall's Stolen Innocence detailed

her forced marriage at the hands of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day

Saints (FLDS) prophet Warren Jeffs. Jeffs, who was put on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted

list in 2006 and captured shortly thereafter, stood trial in 2007 as an accomplice to rape in

Wall's case. In her autobiography, Wall described how Jeffs forced her, at the age of

fourteen, to marry a nineteen-year-old cousin against her will and how her husband

subsequently physically and sexually abused her until she left the FLDS four years

later. Each woman described polygamy as intertwined with teachings on the inferiority

of women that many American readers would have recognized as similar to teachings

promoted by the Church. Such teachings, the women argued, enabled men to justify

brutalizing women and children and forced women to accept the abuse. And in every case

Utah's authorities failed the victims by not enforcing the state's laws against plural

marriage.

Attention to polygamy culminated, in this period, with the 2008 raid by law

enforcement on the FLDS Yearning for Zion Ranch, in Eldorado, Texas. Authorities

claimed they were responding to a call for help from a sixteen-year-old girl who said she

was pregnant by a much older man she had been forced to marry, but after raiding the

community authorities could not locate the girl and discovered that the man to whom she

was supposedly married lived in another state. Texas authorities alleging, widespread

abuse, removed four hundred children from their parents' custody, but a state appeals
27
With Dave Perrin (Lister, BC, Canada: Dave's Press, Ltd., 2004). Quotation on 74.
28
With Lisa Pulitzer, Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming
a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs (New York: William Morrow, 2008).
29
See Ralph Blumenthal and Gretel C. Kovach, "Focus of a Raid in Texas Was Living Out of
State," New York Times, April 8, 2008.
 298

court ruled that the state had seized the children illegally and ordered all but a few

returned to their families. Members of the FLDS fought back in the court of public

opinion, granting the media unprecedented access to their homes and their lives with

profile pieces in The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic?1 But despite

the court's decision, the state's return of the children, and the relatively few court cases

arising from the raids (as of 2009, only one man had been convicted of sexual assault on

a minor, for impregnating one of his plural wives when she was sixteen), the most widely

disseminated images perpetuated the image teenage girls forced to marry old men. In

2008, for example, NBC's popular long-running crime drama Law & Order aired an

episode entitled "Lost Boys," in which a young polygamous wife attempted to escape her

abusive, middle-aged husband only to be coerced back into the fold. True to its tagline—

"Ripped from the headlines"—the show emphasized the failure of law enforcement to
'i'y

protect her from her abuser.

Beginning in 2006, the critically-acclaimed HBO drama series Big Love

attempted to bring together Americans' disparate images of polygamy as both an

alternative lifestyle that should be respect and abusive fundamentalism from which

women and children should be protected. Following middle-class Salt Lake City

businessman Bill Henrickson and his three wives, the show's main plot demonstrated that

polygamists could very well be just like the rest of us. Bill manages his business, raises
30
Ralph Blumenthal, "Court Says Texas Illegally Seized Sect's Children," New York Times, May
23, 2008.
31
Sara Corbett, "Children of God," New York Times Magazine, July 27, 2008; Scott Anderson,
"The Polygamists: An Exclusive Look Inside the FLDS," National Geographic, with photographs by
Stephanie Sinclair, February 2010.
32
Christopher Zalla, dir. "Lost Boys," Law & Order Season 19, Episode 3, NBC, November 19,
2008.
 299

his children, and loves his spouse(s) all while trying to be a good man and a productive

citizen. The show tracks the darker side of polygamy, too, in the person of fundamentalist

prophet Roman Grant, to whom Bill is unwillingly tied because of his parents'

membership in Grant's church and through his second wife, who is Grant's daughter.

Despite the fact that many people know—or at least suspect—what is going on in Bill's

homes and the prophet's rural compound, Bill and his family fear social ostracism more

than they do legal action. The members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

who surround the polygamists and run the state are depicted as peevishly intolerant of the

Henricksons' ways, but they are complicit insofar as they do nothing to stop them from

practicing their polygamous faith. And while all of Bill's wives are well-cared for and

respected within his family, and even Prophet Grant will not marry his latest favorite

young woman until she is legally of age, the women are still victims. Bill might suffer

from stress, but his wives are each lonely and unfulfilled in their own ways, and when the

family's secrets spill into public view, as they do throughout the ongoing series, the

wives suffer the mostly social consequences far more than Bill ever does.33

This theme of the victimization of women persists in treatments of Mormonism

that do not deal with plural marriage. Combining the story of Deborah Laake's 1993

memoir of female subjugation with the format of R. R. Irvine's Salt Lake City-based

detective stories from the '80s and early '90s, writer Natalie R. Collins produced a series

of mystery novels with heroines fighting to escape their Mormon pasts. According to

Collins, the Church itself was guilty of the same abuses for which it and the rest of the

Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, creators, Big Love (USA: HBO, 2006-2011).
 300

world condemned contemporary fundamentalists. The Church excommunicated men and

women for practicing polygamy in this world at the same time that it encouraged a belief

in plural marriage in the afterlife.34 It, also, she contended, covered for men who sexually

abused women and children, thus giving them "free rein to offend over and over again."

And the Church's teaching that temple marriage was forever and divorce was a social and

spiritual failure coerced women into saying in unhappy and even abusive relationships.

In short, "There is nothing in this religion but destruction. At least for the women who

live it."37

Also as in the previous period, women were not viewed as the only victims of

Mormon proscriptions on sexual behavior. Homosexuals, particularly men, were also not

just frowned upon or disapproved of in the Church, but in fact abused by it. The 2003

HBO Films adaptation of Tony Kushner's Angels in America repeated this message to a

much wider audience that the play could reach. While Kushner, who wrote the

screenplay, made many changes in the move from stage to screen, he kept almost the

entirety of Mormon Joe Pitt's struggles with his repressed homosexuality. The major—

and important—difference between Joe's experiences in the play and in the movie was

that rather than leaving Joe alone in his apartment after his wife walked out, the movie

shows Joe's mother, Hannah, returning just after his wife has left. She clearly intends to

stay with Joe and take care of him. Given that Hannah ends up as one member of the

ideal community Kushner represents in the final scene of both the play and the movie, the

34
Wives and Sisters (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004), 44-^t8.
35
Wives and Sisters, 154. See also 148-49.
36
Wives and Sisters, 71; Behind Closed Doors (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007), 103.
Behind Closed Doors, 138.
 301

audience can hope that Joe will, eventually, follow his mother out of institutional

Mormonism and into a more humane spiritual community. The members of the

community as Kushner constructs it maintain their belief in angels but discard traditional

notions of gender roles and family. While Joe's status, finally, is unclear in the movie,

what is certain is that to become a whole person he must, like his mother, walk away

from the Church that denies him the right to be himself.

In Latter Days, former Mormon C. Jay Cox's story of devout Mormon missionary

Aaron, who falls in love with a man and finally leaves the Church, goes even further. The

Church does not simply inflict psychological pain on gay members, in Cox's rendering,

although there is plenty of that. When Aaron falls in love with another man, he fights his

feelings hard, plaintively telling the man, "You have no idea what I'd be giving up."

Aaron believes that the faith and the family that he loves are incompatible with his

homosexuality, and he is right. When he returns home, clearly torn between trying to live

the life that is expected of him and making his family understand that he cannot, his

parents make it clear that he cannot be gay and still be their son. Under the influence of

the religious conviction that their son is a sexual deviant, Aaron's father presides at his

excommunication, where Aaron resoundingly condemns his father and the Church for

denying him the right to live his life as an openly gay man:

Father: And in light of your abnormal and abominable state, and your
refusal to see that you've been duped into a hog wash alternative
lifestyle—I wish my shame was enough for both of us, not to mention the
shame you brought to this church, our family, our ancestors.

Aaron: Wait a minute, our ancestors? Dad, your grandfather had half a
dozen wives. Same goes for every single person in this room. I'd say we
were the original definition of alternative lifestyle.
 302

Father: Are you calling us hypocrites?

Aaron: No. We've gone way beyond hypocrisy, Dad. Now we're just
being mean.

Despite this defiance, Aaron is unable to face his family's rejection and attempts suicide.

But rather than waking up to the pain they are causing a son who cannot change his

parents commit him to a program that uses shock treatments in an attempt to reprogram

him to be straight. In the end, despite his love for his community and his parents, Aaron,

like Kushner's Joe, must walk away from Mormonism in order to live as himself. At the

beginning of the twenty-first century many Americans represented Mormonism's

patriarchal understanding of the universe making life and the afterlife intolerable for

anyone who is not a priesthood holder—a straight man.

Violence: A Story of Violent Faith38

As the twentieth century came to a close, Americans continued to engage in

highly wrought political rhetoric as Democratic President Clinton clashed with

conservative Republicans in Congress. With the language of culture war unabated,

Americans continued to attach violent images to those perceived to be the most right-

wing of religious and social conservatives, the Latter-day Saints. Without any new

sensational violent crimes to focus on, Americans turned to both the recent and the

distant past to demonstrate the perceived Mormon penchant for violence. Authors

revisited Gary Gilmore and fundamentalists Ron and Dan Lafferty, who murdered their

38
Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (New York: Doubleday,
2003).
 303

brother's wife and child in 1984. From the more distant past, Americans revived the old

standby of the Mountain Meadows massacre and Zane Grey's 1912 Western Riders of the

Purple Sage. More obscure material was brought to light when one novelist used William

Hooper Young's 1902 murder, which the grandson of Brigham Young supposedly

committed as an act of blood atonement, as the framework for a horror novel. Finally,

simply to be a Mormon in a cultural sense—generally signified by a character's origins in

Utah, especially the Mormon stronghold of Provo—implied a potential for violence that

viewers had come to recognize. In the American mind, the Latter-day Saints were good

conservatives, and like all good conservatives they loved their guns and were willing to

commit terrible acts of violence for causes they believed in.

In 1996, Turner Network Television (TNT) added to its growing stable of original

Western films with a new adaptation of Riders of the Purple Sage. Starring Ed Harris as

the grim-faced cowboy Lassiter, the film does not once identifies by name the religious

community that commands the frontier town where the heroine, Jane Withersteen, lives.

But sprinkling clues like bread crumbs, the film quickly leads viewers to their identity:

every man in town is identified as having a religious office; the "pastor" has complete

authority over the townspeople, even going to so far as to tell Withersteen who to marry;

and when men arrive at church on Sunday, they each have wagons full of plural wives.

Aside from avoiding the word Mormon and other terms clearly related to the Church, the

film closely follows Grey's book. The local church leaders order Withersteen to marry

one of them so that he—and through him the church—can gain control of her extensive

property. When she refuses, they set out to ruin her and break her spirit. And despite her
refusal to marry, Withersteen is too much under the power of her faith to leave. As

Lassiter tells her, "[F]or years you've been bound. Habit of years is strong as life itself.

I'm afraid for you. You're gonna lose the cattle that's left, your home and ranch. Your

body's to be held and given to Tull and made to bring children into the world. They've

got you." Eventually Withersteen discovers that her church did the same to Lassiter's

sister, stealing her from her husband and forcing her to marry under the threat that they

would murder her child if she did not obey. This, then, is the fate that these all-powerful

churchmen with many wives plan for Jane Withersteen. Only with the outsider Lassiter's

help is she finally able to break free of the vicious men who rule her community and her

church and who want to rule her.

Nineteenth-century Utah also came to melodramatic life on the screen in the 2007

film September Dawn, which retold the story of the 1857 Mountain Meadows massacre.

Hewing to the historically dubious claims of writers like William Wise and Will Bagley,

the film represents the massacre as the intentional and carefully planned work of Prophet

Brigham Young.39 As in nearly every prior retelling of the destruction of the Fancher

Party, in this film the Gentile emigrants are innocent of harassing the Indians, as local

Mormons claimed when the massacre was first discovered by non-Mormons, and of

contributing to even the mildest disagreement in the Mormon communities through

which they passed. Their only mistake is deciding to travel through Utah, where

39
Wise, Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Legend and a Monumental Crime (New
York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), and Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the
Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002) both claim that
Brigham Young not only knew of the massacre in advance but in fact ordered it. Their claims stand in
direct contradiction to those laid out by Juanita Brooks in her highly respected Massacre at Mountain
Meadows (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1950). Reviewers generally dismissed both Wise and
Bagley as shaping the facts to fit their biased arguments.
 305

bloodthirsty bishops stand by as their beloved wives are murdered by the Danites as

punishment for disobeying the Prophet and where the Prophet uses bloodthirsty religious

doctrines to convince people to commit murder. In fact, according to this rendering of the

tale, the Mormons who committed the crime did so because, as one character says, it is

their "duty to the Mormon God Brigham Young." The Church leaders have convinced

their followers they are gods here on earth, and therefore the people must carry out even

the most horrible orders. Brigham Young orders the massacre to demonstrate his

complete power over all of the people who enter his territory. The Prophet himself is

power-mad and willing to kill anyone, be they Gentile or Mormon, who appears to him to

challenge his authority.40

Mikal Gilmore's family memoir Shot in the Heart (1994) looked to his family's

Mormon heritage to explain the murders for which his older brother Gary chose to be

shot at his execution in 1976. For the younger Gilmore, the Mormons' bloody history was

the key to understanding both his brother's crimes and his choice of the method of his

execution. Gilmore traced blood atonement back to the Saints' early history, arguing that

after the expulsions from Missouri and Joseph Smith's murder in Illinois, the Mormons

became a bloodthirsty people. The Mountain Meadows massacre and the tales of crimes

committed by the Danites (to which Gilmore gave full credence) resulted from this lust

for revenge. Thus the early Mormons' crimes grew out of their own pain, just as Gary's

murders had grown out of his pain over the loss of his lover. Gilmore also traced Gary's

decision to die in front of firing squad to their Mormon mother's grisly tales of Latter-day

40
Christopher Cain, dir. (USA: Sony Pictures, 2007).
41
Mikal Gilmore, Shot in the Heart (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 17-21.
 306

Saint vengeance and salvation. After a suicide attempt in jail, Gilmore reported, Gary

said "he wanted to bleed to death, wanted to die, but more than that he want[ed] to bleed

to death." "Looking at those words now," Mikal Gilmore wrote, "it all seems so apparent:

This was Gary's first stab at blood atonement." Mikal Gilmore held the contemporary

Mormons guilty of bloodlust as well, with their "passion for blood atonement" given state

sanction through Utah's unique administration of the death penalty. From the younger

Gilmore's perspective, Gary committed a long slow suicide by cop, and he did so in a

state where the prevailing religion guaranteed that he would get the bloody death that his

Mormon mother had taught him would serve as penance for his misdeeds.

The HBO Films adaptation of Gilmore's book, first aired in 2001, graphically

depicted the parallels Mikal Gilmore saw between his brother's crime and punishment

and their family's Mormon heritage. Near the end of the film, as Gary is about to be put

to death by a firing squad, the image of him strapped to a chair with a hood over his head

is replaced by scenes of a group of men in nineteenth-century dress hauling a screaming,

terrified man in a nightshirt out of a log cabin. As they drag their victim toward a hole in

the ground, the voice of Gary and Mikal's mother narrates:

Would you love that man or woman enough to shed their blood? This is
loving our neighbor as ourselves. If he needs help, help him. And if he
wants salvation, and if he should commit an offense that requires you to
spill his blood on the earth in order that he be saved, spill it. That is the
way to love mankind. That is what Brigham Young said, Mikal.

The nineteenth century Danites pull their victim's head back and slit his throat. Blood

sprays vividly across the scene, and the audience can see that the man's throat has been

42
253.
43
327.
 307

laid open to the spine. Simultaneously, we hear the sound of the shots that killed Gary

Gilmore being fired. Finally, Mikal Gilmore says, "These were the stories of blood

atonement my mother told us." Mormon violence is not simply history. It lives on in men

and women who hurt one another to dull their own pain, and in people who punish

murder with bloody murder.44

In 2003, adventure writer Jon Krakauer had a runaway bestseller with Under the

Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, in which he set out to "plumb the murky

sectors of the heart and head that prompt most of us to believe in God—and an

impassioned few, predictably, to carry that irrational belief to its logical end." 5 But in

exploring this logical end—a fundamentalism so extreme that it inspired Utahns Ron and

Dan Lafferty to murder their sister-in-law and her one-year-old child in 1984—Krakauer

did not explore religious fundamentalism in general. The context of his study is the

myriad ways in which he can connect the zealotry that led fundamentalists like the

Laffertys and Ervil LeBaron to murder to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,

the context, he reminds us, of Mark Hofinann's crimes. Like Scott Anderson's 1993 book

on Ervil LeBaron, "the Mormon Manson," Krakauer did not simply relate the history that

the Church shares with fundamentalists like the Laffertys. Rather, he pointed again and

again to how recent some of that history, like the restriction that prevented blacks from

holding the priesthood until 1978, is.46 He also emphasized that the Church had not

erased the discarded doctrine of polygamy, the primary basis for contemporary Mormon

44
Shot in the Heart (USA: HBO Films, 2001).
45
Krakauer, xxi.
46
See, for example, 156-57, note on 207.
 308

fundamentalism, from its scriptures—without noting parallel examples of

commandments that modem Jews and Christians do not follow and yet have not erased

from the Bible.47 The modem Church, Krakauer told readers, for all the distance leaders

try to put between themselves and their fundamentalist cousins, is the source from which

people like Hofmann, LeBaron, and the Laffertys spring. The apples don't fall far from

the tree.

Like the TNT update of Riders of the Purple Sage, the 2002 Adam Sandler

vehicle Punch-Drunk Love never identified any characters as Mormons. But when

Sandler's character Barry Egan calls a sex chat-line the owner, who caller ID locates in

Provo, Utah, blackmails him, demanding money in exchange for the chat-line owner

never using Egan's contact information to tell his family and friends that he paid to have

someone talk dirty to him. When Egan refuses to pay, the chat-line owner orders a group

of thugs to beat him into submission, and their leader pointedly asks if he can "take the

brothers on this mission?" When the chat-line owner and his employees threaten Egan,

they repeatedly tell him that he deserves what he gets from them because he is "a

pervert." They justify their extortion as Egan's due punishment for his sexual immorality.

Like many Mormon characters before them, these criminals in the Mormon stronghold of

Provo—home of the Saints' missionary training center and Brigham Young University—

use morality to justify abusing and taking advantage of hapless Gentiles.

Provo also sets the stage for Brian Evenson's horror novel The Open Curtain,

which traces a young Mormon man's descent in murderous madness. The story follows

47
See 252-53.
48
Paul Thomas Anderson, dir. (USA: New Line Cinema, 2002).
 309

Rudd, a troubled teenager whose family is defined by secrets and who is himself defined

by a striking lack of individuality. This might not be a problem, if it marked him as the

kind of "vague and lifeless avatar of Mormon ideals" that he thinks his religion

demands.49 But Rudd does not admire his religion, and his lack of personality leaves him

a blank slate for the worst that Mormon culture has to offer. When he discovers old

newspaper coverage of William Hooper Young's 1902 murder of a young woman,

labeled by the press as an act of blood atonement, Rudd becomes obsessed. In the midst

of a town outwardly defined by Mormonism, Rudd slowly begins to lose his sense of

time and of himself. Eventually, he tries to recreate Young's 1902 murder by attempting

to kill his own wife, who discovers that he murdered her entire family. But Rudd's

murders were not simply an homage to the dark side of Mormonism's past in the person

of William Hooper Young. They were also Rudd's twisted attempt to make sense of

contemporary Mormon temple rituals, in part by carving the symbols normally stitched

on sacred temple garments onto the bodies of his victims. Evenson explained in an

afterword that violence is inherent to Mormon culture, and was embodied in the violence

once enacted in the temple endowment ceremony. That latent violence was, he claimed,

"repressed" by the 1990 elimination of parts of the ceremony in which individuals mimed

being killed as punishment should they ever reveal the secret temple rituals.5 According

to Evenson, the Saints' violent past is not dead. It pervades their rituals and their culture,

and members especially ignore it at their peril.

The Open Curtain: A Novel (St. Paul, MN: Coffee House Press Books, 2006), 35.
1
Evenson, 222.
 310

But even in the contemporary period, violence is not restricted to the most

observant or most acculturated Saints. In the forgettable film One Night at McCool's

(2001), Mormon violence brackets the story. At the beginning of the movie, a beautiful

young woman claims to be on the run from her abusive boyfriend, whom she calls Utah.

Her would-be rescuer responds, "Is he a—Mormon?" When Utah arrives, this question

seems like a purposefully bad joke: played by Andrew Dice Clay, a comedian well

known for his raunchy stand-up, he looks and acts like a Hell's Angel. The young woman

kills Utah, she claims in self-defense, and even the police who arrive to investigate

remark on his improbable nickname: "He went by—Utah." "Utah? The Mormon state?"

"Yeah. Don't ask me." Utah seems long forgotten until the end of the film, when his twin

brother Elmo arrives. Rather than a leather-clad thug, however, Elmo (also played by

Andrew Dice Clay) is dressed in a white, button-down shirt, black slacks, and a dark tie,

with a short, neat haircut and nary a piercing in sight. He looks every inch the good

Mormon missionary—until he informs everyone, in language that he struggles to make

profanity-free, that he has come to avenge his brother. He proceeds to pull out an

impressive array of firearms and unload them on the other characters. The film does not

explain why or how Elmo became so violent, but reasons are not necessary. The image of

a clean-cut Mormon missionary hauling out an Uzi works: it is funny because it

juxtaposes images of moral rectitude and violence. But it is also sufficiently plausible,

because American audiences have come to expect violence from Mormon characters.
 311

Theocracy: "all in the name of God."51

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day

Saints remained, from the perspective of Americans standing outside looking in, as much

a corporate entity as a religious organization. Church members continued to tithe,

Americans wrote, in order to maintain their access to religiously essential temple rituals;

the Church smartly invested its undisclosed income in property and businesses; and

Church leaders continued to instruct members not only on how to nurture their souls but

also how to treat their bodies—and those of their neighbors. This continued blending of

religious, economic, social, and political imperatives looked to many Americans like an

inappropriate intrusion of religious leaders in the secular lives of their followers. The fact

that individual Mormons allowed their Church to thus intrude only made matters worse,

in the eyes of critics. The fact that Church and members alike exuded what looked to

many outsiders like an aura of self-satisfied success was worst of all. As the twentieth

century drew to a close, Americans continued to view Mormons as a unified and

hegemonic group that inappropriately brought their religion out of their churches and into

board rooms, bedrooms, classrooms, and voting booths across the nation.

The Church and its members alike seemed preternaturally blessed in the world of

business. Figures like CEO Bill Marriott and venture capitalist Mitt Romney were only

the tip of the iceberg, inspiring others to ask what the Latter-day Saints were doing so

right. The Mormon Way of Doing Business, published in 2007 by Mormon author Jeff

Benedict, tmed the stereotype to the Mormons' advantage. Benedict promised to tell the

51
Simon Worrall, The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Literary Crime and the Art of
Forgery (New York: Dutton Adult, 2002), 82.
 312

rest of America, through interviews with eight Mormon CEOs, how to emulate Mormon

practices to achieve similar success. The list of subjects was impressive, including

leading executives at JetBlue Airways, Dell, and American Express, a former CEO of

Madison Square Garden, and a former dean of the Harvard Business School. According

to the author, these men achieved their success in highly competitive industries without

compromising their principles in large part because of their religion. The book featured

chapters not only on business practices, but also tithing, family, and "A Day of Rest,"

highlighting each man's insistence that everyone needs at least one day off every week

and for good Mormons, it has to be Sunday. Such men and such books reinforced the

image of Mormons as well-suited for business, in part because their religion made them

so.52

Journalists Richard N. and Joan K. Ostling approached the Saints' business

prowess as part of their larger study Mormon America: The Power and the Promise. But

while the Ostlings generally gave Mormons and Mormonism a fair and balanced hearing

within their pages, on the surface Mormon business savvy and institutional secrecy stole

the spotlight. The book's cover, both on the original hardcover (1999) and again on the

paperback second edition (2007)—"Revised and Updated for the 2008 Election"—

featured dramatic photos of the Salt Lake City temple. Taken from just outside and

partially through the wrought iron gates beneath the temple's facade, the images

dominate the covers. Viewed from below the temple is both impressive and

overpowering, and the closed gates remind readers that this powerful symbol of the

52
The Mormon Way of Doing Business: Leadership and Success through Faith and Family (New
York: Warner Business Books, 2007).
 313

Church is closed to them—like the Church's many secrets. The title itself further

reinforces the impression of Mormonism's overwhelming power: the word Mormon sits

atop and slightly overlaps the word America, as if "Mormon" is pushing "America" into

the background. The cover promises readers "The True Story Behind Their Beliefs,

Practices, Rituals, Business Practices, and Well-Guarded Secrets," and chapter titles

include "Mormons, Inc." and "The Power Pyramid." Finally, the Ostlings promise in

their introduction to delineate the Church's "$25 to $30 billion in assets and an estimated

$5 or $6 billion in annual income."53 Whether these sensational images and facts were

chosen by the authors for topical emphasis or by editors, graphic designers, and

publishers to draw in readers, they play on Americans' interest in the Mormons'

perceived wealth, secrecy, and burgeoning power.

The image of the Saints' collective and individual economic prowess—and their

desire for it—carried over into wholeheartedly negative images in this period as well.

Books like The Mormon Conspiracy: A Review off Present Day and Historical

Conspiracies to Mormonize America and the World (2001), echoing respected journalists

like The New York Times' Wallace Turner, explained to readers that the Mormons used

their boundless wealth to pay for aggressive proseletyzing and indoctrination among

converts and members alike.54 A 1996 review of one biography of Howard Hughes noted

that the book failed to deliver any important information, which, according to the

reviewer, included the fact that the reclusive billionaire "put himself at last into the hands

53
(San Francisco, CA: HarperSan Francisco, 1999; New York: HarperOne, 2007), xvii. Citations
are from the 2007 edition.
54
Charles L. Wood (Chula Vista, CA: Black Forest Press, 2001).
 314

of a group of greedy and coldhearted Mormons [...] who kept him drugged and isolated

until eventually, when he became too much trouble and they controlled the business, he

died of an overdose of codeine."55 The writer is ambiguous as to whether Hughes' death

was intentional on the part of his heartless Mormon handlers, or simply a result of their

willful carelessness. Whether they work together for the Church or for their own selfish

interests, Mormons are certain to succeed.

American continued to view Mormons as a group as true believers wholly

committed to an authoritarian organization that made their decisions for them just as it

spent their money for them. One writer likened the Mormons to other ideologies she

identified as extreme—the ultra-conservative Catholic organization Opus Dei, Israeli

kibbutzes, revolutionary socialism—that attracted fervent youth who devoutly if naively

wanted to serve a higher cause.56 And like devotees of other such ideologies, the

Mormons were wholly devoted to their organization in every aspect of their lives and to

spreading their beliefs far and wide. But such devotion did not contribute to making the

Mormons good American pluralists, instead driving them to impose their religion on

others. As one Salt Lake City resident noted in response to a Mormon-dominated high

school's refusal to respect a Jewish student's request (backed by a court order) that no

Christian music be performed during graduation ceremonies, "It is a shame to see the

Donald E. Westlake, "A Prison of His Own Making," rev. of Howard Hughes: The Untold Story
by Peter Harry Brown and Pat H. Broeske (New York: Dutton, 1996), New York Times, June 16, 1996. For
a pointed example of Wallace Turner's take on the Mormons' finances, see "Ledgers of the Latter-day
Saints," rev. The Mormon Corporate Empire by John Heinerman and Anson Shupe (Boston: Beacon Press,
1986), New York Times, April 6, 1986.
56
Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, "Secret Service," rev. Beyond the Threshold: A Life in Opus Dei by
Maria del Carmen Tapia (New York: Continuum, 1997), New York Times, October 12, 1997.
 315

once-minority Mormons inflict the same persecutions that they once fled from."57 Once

ostracized and excluded themselves, the Mormons appeared to other Americans to have

forgotten the lessons of their own history in their zeal to force their faith on others.

Non-Mormons continued to follow with interest the Church's practice of

eliminating dissenting or disobedient members, viewing it as representative for the

Church's wholesale repression of free speech. The New York Times noted in 1994 that

"[t]he Mormon Church continues to excommunicate members who dissent from Mormon

orthodoxy." The writer also observed—not without humor—that the offending member

was excommunicated for his failure to stop, when ordered to do so by Church leaders,

writing letters to national newspapers that highlighted controversial historical or doctrinal

facts about the Church, such as the Mormons' continuing belief in polygamy in the

afterlife. The Times quoted the man as responding, after his ejection, "I never realized
CO

that someone could be disciplined for telling the truth." But the Church leaders' motives

were not, apparently, only the desire to repress dissent and enforce obedience. An article

on the Church's worldwide growth in 1994 opened with a review of the Church's recent

excommunication of prominent intellectuals. Quoting respected scholar of Mormonism

Jan Shipps, the writer noted that the Church's "oversight to keep the message simple

enough for a new believer drives the intellectuals up the wall."59 The Church was not

only authoritarian, then, but anti-intellectual. To prevent disobedience and to preach to

Quoted in Frank Rich, "The God Patrol," The New York Times, July 12, 1995.
58
Ari L. Goldman, "Religion Notes," May 7, 1994.
59
Gustav Niebuhr, "A Mormon Church Leader Weighs in on Growth and Dissent," New York
Times, July 4, 1994.
 316

the lowest common denominator it actively prevented members from speaking freely

about their faith.

Journalist Simon Worrall resurrected Mark Hofinann's story in 2002,

emphasizing the theory that Hofmann was motivated to commit his crimes to punish the

Church for its secrecy and dishonesty about its own history. But Worrall took his

explanation a step further, arguing that what viewed as the fraudulent nature of Joseph

Smith, his "visions," and the Church he built on them had created a culture of deceit that

not only protected Hofmann once his criminal behavior was begun, but in fact made him

a criminal in the first place. Hofmann, Worrall wrote, "came to realize that the city he

lived in had been built on a grand illusion and that the boundaries between fact and

fiction, truth and illusion, were blurred and constantly shifting." Hofinann's penchant for

forgery was merely the outward sign of the "forced and counterfeit emotions" that had

been imposed on him by his Mormon upbringing. Further, he felt justified in exacting

revenge for the false life he was forced to lead in a culture that not only protected but

celebrated "bank managers and shopkeepers, the petty-minded, self-righteous church

officials with the stem, humorless faces, some of whom he knew had beaten their

children senseless, all in the name of God."61 In the end, Worrall argued, Hofmann hated

"everything the Church stood for: its hypocrisy and repressiveness, its manipulation of

history. [...] he felt trapped in an authoritarian society where illusion was truth and truth

was illusion."62 Worrall did not support Hofinann's crimes, but he agreed wholeheartedly

60
Worrall, 78.
61
Worrall, 82.
62
Worrall, 90.
 317

with Hofinann's reported assessments of Mormon religion and culture. In a Church that

controlled information in order to control its people, deceit was not only Hofinann's tool

against the Mormon Church but his very nature as a Mormon.

The Church's control of its members was not always frightening. Sometimes, just

as in Mark Twain's Roughing It (1871) or Carl Moffatt's The Desert and Mrs. Ajax,

Mormon social control created some very comic characters. In real life, The New York

Times poked fun at Brigham Young University's restrictive dress code—or, more

precisely, in the professional oddities that the rule against facial hair created. The Times

reported in 1996 that the school only made exceptions to the rule against men wearing

beards for those who could present medical evidence that they could not shave. Such men

received a "beard card" from the university, and could not even check out books from the

library without presenting this proof that their facial hair was approved. Thus, the Times

declared, men at BYU needed the assistance of "doctors who did their residencies at

barber schools."64 While the article's analysis was questionable, its point was not: the fact

that BYU's dress code was so controlling that it required that men had to get a doctor's

approval to wear facial hair was, in this day and age, simply ridiculous.

The 1999 film Goodbye Lover, an attempt at a stylish noir studded with B-list

Hollywood celebrities, followed hard-nosed detective Rita Pompano as she led a murder

investigation. Early in the film, Pompano balks when she discovers that her new sidekick,

Rollins, is a Mormon. The frumpy and awkward young man outs himself as a Saint by

constantly preaching against the evils of alcohol consumption without any regard for the

63
See chapter 2, pp. 45-47.
64
Allen R. Myerson, "Help Wanted: Gyration Inspectors," New York Times, February 4, 1996.
 318

subject's relevance to the murder case. After his first outburst on the subject, Pompano

inquires, "Where are you from - Mars?" When he responds that he comes from Salt

Lake, she remarks with evident annoyance, "Great, I got partnered with Brigham

Young." But this reference is not to Brigham Young the strong, ruthless, worldly leader.

Rather, Rollins' religious affiliation identifies him as an inexperienced hick. He remains,

throughout the film, a country mouse who cannot keep up with, much less understand,

dark and complicated human behavior, an impression reinforced when Pompano refers to

him as "Barney Fife." When Pompano solves the crime, she agrees to protect the

murderer in exchange for a steep fee. At the film's end, the jig seems to be up when the

killer and the detective bump into Rollins in a distant city. But despite seeing Pompano

and the suspected murderer together, Rollins, with his trusting nature, fails to put two-

and-two together. He reflects, as the two drive away together, "Sure is nice to see good

things happen to good people!" Rollins' character was a double-edged sword,

representing Mormons as naive and trusting religious fools and Salt Lake City, still often

referred to as the Mormon Zion, as an unsophisticated one horse town.

A more famous use of this type was "the Mormon twins," Virgil and Turk

Malloy, in the hit Ocean's series of movies starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt.

Ocean's 11, the first installment in the series, followed a group of conmen and

sophisticated thieves as they rob a group of Las Vegas casinos. Among this group of

professional criminals, the Mormon twins are primarily an extra pair of bodies whose

constant, irritating bickering drives their partners crazy but also serves as a useful

diversion when other members of the group need it. The Twins—who, like the Mormon
 319

antagonists in Punch-Drunk Love and The Open Curtain, come from Provo—first appear

in the film on a dirt track in Utah, with one driving a pick-up truck in a race against a

remote-controlled tmck operated by the other. When the remote-controlled truck wins the

race, the losing driver simply runs over his brother's expensive toy in a fit of petulance.

The Twins are immature, crass, and almost unbearably obnoxious, in stark contrast to the

intelligence, sophistication, and suavity of their fellow thieves—and they are Mormons

from rural Utah. Although they never express any interest in or knowledge of their

religious culture, they are still defined by it. And their bad behavior both taints and is

explained by their roots in uncultured and anti-intellectual Mormon country.65

The Saints' ongoing association with conservative politics in the United States

gave them common cause with the Republican Party's base of largely Southern and

Midwestern evangelicals, another group often painted as anti-intellectual. Mitt Romney,

who ran for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, hardly fit the stereotype. The

former Governor of Massachusetts, Romney was urban, educated, and good-looking in a

polished way. But Romney's Mormonism handicapped him with voters on both ends of

the political spectrum: liberal-leaning voters thought of Mormons as arch-conservatives

(this despite Romney having been the governor of solidly Democratic Massachusetts,

where he oversaw the institution of the first state-sponsored health insurance program in

the nation); conservatives, many of whom were conservative Christians, worried that his

religion was a cult. And despite the fact that in a 1996 Pew forum poll showed that more

than fifty percent of Americans believed churches should speak up on political issues, in

Steven Soderbergh, dir. (USA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2001).

2007 many Americans from across the political spectrum worried that Mitt Romney, if

elected, would take orders from the Mormon leadership about how to run the country.66

Many Americans might approve Religious leaders speaking out on political matters, but

so few non-Mormons could tolerate the Mormons' perspectives on both religion and

politics that no one wanted Mormon leaders guiding the nation's President.

Romney's religion proved itself a potential liability long before his presidential

campaign, when he ran for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts in 1994. During that

campaign both Romney's Democratic opponent, the formidable incumbent Ted Kennedy,

and his nephew, a United States Representative, argued that Romney needed to be

questioned about his leadership of the Boston-area Mormon community. They

specifically reminded voters that until 1978, Romney's Church had banned black

members from joining their priesthood. What, they each wondered, was Romney's stand

on his Church's former policy?67 Kennedy also pointedly declared his support for

women's ordination in his own Church, the Roman Catholic, in contrast to the Mormon

Church's continuing limitation of its priesthood to men.68 Their tactics seemed to

backfire, garnering criticism in Massachusetts and beyond as "Mormon-baiting."69 But

they were not alone in their criticisms. Responding to Romney's claim that he was and

long had been pro-choice, The New York Times reported that an unnamed woman had

66
For an overview of the 1996 poll, see Gustav Niebuhr, "Public Supports Political Voice for
Churches," New York Times, June 25, 1996. For data on public responses to a Mormon presidential
candidate, see "How the Public Perceives Romney, Mormons," The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life,
December 4, 2007. Online at www.pewforum.org.
67
See "Religion Is the Latest Volatile Issue in Kennedy Contest," New York Times, September 29,
1994; "An Icon of '60s Liberalism Goes on the Attack," New York Times, October 19, 1994.
68
Gustav Niebuhr, "Kennedy Supports Ordination of Women As Catholic Priests," New York
Times, September 8, 1994.
69
See Frank Rich, "The Manchurian Candidate II," New York Times, October 13, 1994.
 321

published an essay in a Mormon women's newspaper about how, years before, her bishop

had visited her in the hospital and urged her not to abort a pregnancy that doctors told her

might kill her. "Friends of the woman," the article claimed, "say that bishop was Mr.

Romney."70 In short, all of the Mormon Church's reputed racism and sexism were

leveled at Romney, despite the fact that the Church no longer barred blacks from the

priesthood and that Romney had publicly declared he supported abortion. Like his father

before him, Romney was suspected as a Mormon of being in lockstep with his Church's

leaders. He lost the race.

But that was a race for a Senate seat in a blue state against the Liberal Lion of the

Senate himself. Surely such criticisms of Romney's conservative religion should not have

been a problem in a Republican primary race? But in 2007, Romney faced the flip side of

American fears about Mormonism in the culture war years. Whereas in 1994 he faced

liberal criticisms of his Church as too socially and politically conservative, during his

presidential campaign he confronted conservative Christians' fears that his religion was

not Christian enough. But in both cases, Americans' fears were ungirded by the
71

assumption that, as a Mormon, Romney would follow his Church's orders in office. In

December 2007, Romney tried to quiet conservative fears about his religion with his

speech "Faith in America," in which he avoided specific statements about his religion,

but assured the public that "no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that

matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is theirs, within
70
Anna Quindlen, "Polls, Not Passion," November 9, 1994.
71
See Adam Nagourney and Laurie Goodstein, "Mormon Candidate Braces for Religion As
Issue," New York Times, February 8, 2007; Kenneth Woodward, "The Presidency's Mormon Moment,"
New York Times, April 9, 2007; Michael Luo, "Romney Accuses Sharpton of a Bigoted Remark," New
York Times, May 10, 2007.
the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin." But

whether because of fears about his Church's influence in his political actions, or because

of the conservative Christian worries aggravated by opponent Mike Huckabee's well-

timed question about what Mormons believe (delivered just days after Romney's speech

on his faith), Romney did not gamer significant support in early primary elections. He

withdrew from the presidential race in February 2008.

The specter of Mormon political control forced itself into the American public

consciousness for the remainder of the 2008 campaign season in a hard-fought battle in

California over a proposed ban on same-sex marriage. While the Church denied any

official involvement, Mormons drew on their renowned organizational prowess and

campaigned hard for Proposition 8, and many contributed money to the campaign for the

ballot initiative. When Proposition 8 passed, supporters of gay marriage laid a substantial

measure of the blame squarely on the Church's doorstep. This despite the fact that

Mormons were only one small part of an opposition that also counted Roman Catholics

and evangelical Protestants—both much larger groups than the Latter-day Saints. The
n"i

Saints' support of the ban inspired protests in Temple Square in Salt Lake City. Oscar-

winning actor Tom Hanks, one of the producers of the television series Big Love,

declared Mormon support for Proposition 8 "un-American" at a premier event for the

show.74 And a 2010 documentary film labeled the ban 8: The Mormon Proposition. At

72
"Romney's 'Faith in America' Address," New York Times, December 6,2007.
73
"Mormon Church Draws Protest over Marriage Act," New York Times, November 8, 2008.
74
Tom Leonard, "Tom Hanks Apologises for Calling Mormons 'un-American' for Supporting
Gay Marriage Ban," Telegraph (London), January 25, 2009. Online at http://telegraph.co.uk.
75
See Stephen Holden, "Marching in the War on Gay Marriage," rev. 8: The Mormon
Proposition, Reed Cowan, dir. (USA: Red Flag Releasing, 2010), New York Times, June 18, 2010.
the beginning of the twenty-first century as at the end of the nineteenth, Americans still

strongly suspected that the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

voted and dressed and acted and thought as their Church leaders told them. The result, in

the popular mind, was a community of people who do not think for themselves and

whose ultimate goal is to impose their religion and its values on the rest of the nation.

American Mormon: "sacred past [...] and what is the shadow side"76

At the turn of the twenty-first century non-Mormon Americans produced few

idealized images of the Latter-day Saints. Instead, representations of the Mormons'

positive qualities almost always accompanied discussions of their troubled history and

more controversial practices. But this lack of romanticized images, rather than simply

underlining negative stereotypes, was in fact a sign that Americans were starting to treat

the Saints like any other (conservative) religion. While the Mormons were far from

mainstream, as evidenced by the fact that any public discussion of Mormonism began by

identifying the discussants' relationship to the Church, the fact that observers

increasingly treated the Church and its members with affection, humor, disapproval, and

dislike—in combination in the same sources—hinted that some Americans were

beginning to view Mormons as multi-faceted people in a diverse community. For the first

time, numbers of non-Mormon sources were consistently treating the Mormons as real

people and not simply as stereotypes.

76
Helen Whitney, dir. The Mormons, Frontline and American Experience, PBS, April 2007.
Online at www.pbs.org.
 Throughout the 1990s, depictions of the Saints followed the old patterns—the

Mormons were good or bad, but very seldom anything in between. Often, the good was

produced by Mormons themselves. The Mormons' pioneer past received its due in a 1997

PBS documentary with the romantic title Trail of Hope, directed by Utah filmmaker Lee

Groberg. Following the Saints on their long journey West, the film failed, to one

reviewer's mind, to capitalize on the inherent interest of their story by emphasizing only

their sacrifice and hardship and avoiding any difficult or controversial material. The

documentary emphasized the intolerance that forced the Saints to move West, the

fortitude that carried them to the Great Salt Lake, and the hard work and thrift that

enabled them to thrive. This was a tale of Mormon pioneers trekking at the vanguard of

Manifest Destiny, helping make the way safe for the many other Americans who would

follow.77

The category of "good" also encompassed contemporary figures like Stephen

Covey, whose The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, first published in 1989,

remained a popular self-help guide throughout the 1990s. But Covey himself, although

identifying as Latter-day Saint, did not carry his faith too far: a 1998 profile in The New

York Times revealed that "a devout Mormon, he is never without a Bible."78 Covey did

not claim he carried the Book of Mormon or Doctrine and Covenants or other peculiarly

Mormon scripture, but the Bible revered by all Christians. Similarly, Mormon author

Richard Paul Evans became a smash success in the late '90s with saccharine Christmas-

See Walter Goodman, "Great Trek Inspired by Faith," rev. Trail of Hope: The Story of the
Mormon Trail, Lee Groberg, dir. (USA: PBS, 1997), New York Times, August 8, 1997.
78
Julia Lawlor, "In My... Briefcase: Stephen R. Covey," November 15, 1998.
 325

themed novels that sold millions of copies.79 Even Senator Orrin Hatch capitalized on

such generic Christian good will with two CDs of inspirational religious songs he wrote

himself, which he marketed in person on the Home Shopping Network on television.80 In

each case, the Mormons were celebrated for highlighting the religious values they shared

with the majority of Americans.

America's Choir, a 2004 documentary about the Mormon Tabernacle Choir by the

director of Trail of Hope, brought together these images of hardy pioneers and generic

contemporary Christians, celebrating the Choir not as the property of a single religious

community but as a national treasure. The film combined interviews with musicians who

had performed with the choir—including composer John Williams, singer Angela

Lansbury, and rock star Sting—with statements from prominent Americans who had

admired the group. The general consensus was nothing short of adulatory. Journalist

Charles Osgood declared the Choir "so much a part of America, like the Grand Canyon

or Mount Rushmore." John Williams attributed the group's power to its ability to "[get]

to that soul place in the American psyche." And according to Sting, who performed with

the choir at the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, the

power of its music came not from its technique—which he nevertheless praised as

"wonderful"—but from "their belief." But in this film as on its weekly radio broadcasts

the Choir's belief, like that of Stephen Covey and Richard Paul Evans and Orrin Hatch,

was not specifically Mormon. It was Christian. The performances excerpted throughout

79
Doreen Carvajal, "The Unlikely New King of Christmas Fiction," New York Times, December
22, 1997.
80
David E. Rosenbaum, "Move over, Elton. Here Comes Orrin," New York Times, December 21,
1997.
 326

the movie included "Come, Come Ye Saints," a hymn that relates the Mormons' pioneer

experience; traditional hymns (described as such in subtitles on the screen) like "Bound

for the Promised Land" and "Come Let Us Anew"; folk music; and of course the national

hymn "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."81

But such perfect, patriotic, wholesome American-ness was not normal—or at least

it no longer struck many Americans that way. The 1999 film SLC Punk told the story of

two non-Mormon teenagers living in Salt Lake City's uber-Mormon culture in 1985. The

teens embrace the punk subculture as a reaction against the arch-conservatism

surrounding them, which they see not as Mormon but as wholly American. As in Tony

Kushner's rendering of socially conservative Mormonism, that wholesome goodness is

just a facade covering up a repressive culture. Similarly, Mitt Romney's clean-cut

handsomeness could look slightly suspect to many observers. When Romney went to Salt

Lake City to clean up the Winter Olympics in the aftermath of revelations that the city

had bribed International Olympic Committee officials, The New York Times could not

mock his image enough. He was "the squeaky-clean new chief executive" with "oh-so-

reassuring ties to big money and the inner elite of this town." He also "sport[ed] a

disconcertingly incessant grin."82 In 2007, his toothsome grin and polished good looks

earned him the moniker "The Mormonator" from one liberal paper in the capital of his

home state, Massachusetts. The paper's cover story was illustrated with a cartoon of a

grinning Romney wearing a leather jacket, carrying a large gun, and sporting a gash on

81
Lee Groberg, dir. America's Choir: The Story of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (USA: PBS,
2004).
82
George Vecsey, "Sports of the Times: Shadows Still Loom over Games," February 12, 1999.
 327

his head that revealed that his skull was metal.83 This robotic perfection continued to

draw laughs as Romney explored the possibility of a run for the presidency in 2012: in

February 2011, Romney delivered the "Top 10 List" on The Late Show with David

Letterman. The category was "Top 10 Things You Don't Know about Mitt Romney."

Item number eight was "I'm the guy in the photo that comes with your picture frame";

number six was, "Do I smell as good as I look? No!"84 Romney's wholesome, clean-cut

image was too picture-perfect to be believed.

Director Helen Whitney's 2007 documentary The Mormons gave a balanced

account of the Saints history from the life of Joseph Smith to the beginning of the twenty-

first century. Asserting that "every religion must explore its sacred past [...] and what is

the shadow side," the film explored both triumphs and tribulations in the Saints' history

and belief, including the difficulties they brought on themselves. The film examined the

Mountain Meadows massacre and polygamy in the nineteenth century and the

excommunication of intellectuals and homosexuals at the turn of the twenty-first century.

But it also examined the persecution they endured and the settlements they built in their

first hundred years, as well as the strong and loving families and communities they

nurture today. Whitney was interested in helping viewers get to know the Mormons—not

in pigeonholing the Saints into easy categories where other Americans could simply

reject or accepts them wholesale as the Mormon image suited viewers' own values.

David Bernstein, illustration by K. Bonami, "The Mormonator: Romney on the Rampage," The
Boston Phoenix, May 25-31,2007.
84
February 2, 2011. Online at www.voutube.com.
 328

During the 2007-2008 television season, the series House took more productive

aim at the white, middle-class, conservative Mormon image in the character of Dr.

Jeffrey Cole. Cole was young, black, and, as the acerbic title character Dr. House

discovered, a Latter-day Saint. As the season progressed House mocked Cole with every

popular stereotype about his faith, wondering why a black man would join a racist

religion, asking him about his "magic underwear," nicknaming him "Big Love," and

generally twitting him at every opportunity about peculiar Mormon beliefs and behaviors.

But rather than simply becoming a review of negative images of the Saints, Cole served

as an object lesson in Mormon diversity. Not only does he not look like most Americans

would expect, but he also does not act like a stereotypical self-righteous conservative or a

mindless believer taking orders from the mother church. During one episode, when

doctors need to determine whether a patient's liver is functioning properly, House gathers

a group of his interns looking for, among other things, a non-drinker. Noticing Cole

wears a ring from BYU and knowing, like many Americans, that Mormons do not drink,

House orders Cole to start drinking as a test case to determine how fast a non-drinker's

liver processes alcohol. Cole at first refuses, but eventually he agrees to participate in the

experiment. Once the drinking has begun, House asks Cole why his religion had suddenly

become optional, and Cole denies the premise that his religion is an all-or-nothing

proposition. His Church, he explains, "doesn't try to dictate every detail of our lives.

When a situation isn't clear, we're encouraged to make our own decisions." When faced

with a difficult choice between obeying Church proscriptions or drinking alcohol as part

of a diagnostic test that might save someone's life, Cole chooses to drink with a clear
 329

conscience. The character, in direct contradiction of many of the typical American

stereotypes with which House had tried to label him, demonstrates to audiences that

Mormons are diverse as well as independently-minded.85

Strangely enough, perhaps the best—and best-known—examples of such attempts

to examine Mormons and Mormonism as a whole rather than in convenient slices was the

work of the creators of South Park. Nearly every project Trey Parker and Matt Stone

worked on together featured Mormon characters trying to negotiate their faith in the

modem world alongside baffled neighbors trying to understand the Mormons' strange

religion. The film Orgazmo (1997) follows Joe Young, a naive Mormon missionary to

Los Angeles through his adventures as a pom star. But Young is not a hypocrite, exactly.

He takes the job because he desperately needs the money, but refuses to compromise his

beliefs by having premarital sex. The director, therefore, agrees to let Young do the

"acting" required by his roles, and to provide a stand-in to do the sex scenes. At film's

end, Young saves his sweet Mormon fiancee and his fellow pom stars from the

machinations of the evil director. In a final scene reminiscent of Tony Kushner's

Epilogue to Angels in America, Young brings together his future wife and pom star

friends to give a prayer of thanks. The oddballs that Young has brought together are a

mix of conservative and liberal religious and social values, but they come together in

mutual respect and affection to form a truly tolerant community.86

5
David Shore, creator, House, M.D., season 4, episode 402, "The Right Stuff," (USA: Fox,
2008).
86
USA: Focus Features, 1997.
 While the "All about the Mormons?" episode of South Park crudely dismissed

Mormon stories of Joseph Smith's prophetic experiences and the origins of the Book of

Mormon, the show nevertheless provided a running commentary on Mormons that

frequently left the Saints, wacky beliefs and all, looking better than many of their

neighbors. The episode "Probably" revealed to viewers in 2000 that, at least in South

Park, only the Mormons get to go to heaven, where they wear missionary uniforms and

sing happy Christian songs for eternity. The following year, "Super Best Friends"

introduced viewers to Jesus's team of super heroes who fight for the good of all

humanity. The team includes figures from the world's major religions including the

Hebrew prophet Moses, the Hindu god Krishna, the Chinese sage Lao Tzu, the Muslim

prophet Mohammed, the Buddha—and Joseph Smith. Far from dismissing Mormonism

as a dangerous cult, the creators of South Park class Smith and his religion as major
QQ

powers for good in the world. But "All about the Mormons?" presents the Mormons in

the most multi-faceted light. After Stan brutally declares Mormonism's founding stories

"a bunch of stories about some asswipe," his Mormon classmate, Gary, makes one last

effort to get through to him. But Gary has no interest in convincing Stan to be his friend

anymore. He is there to have the last word on his religion:

Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely
no sense. And maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up. But I have a great
life, and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that.
The truth is, I don't care if Joseph Smith made it all up, because what the
Church teaches now is loving your family, being nice and helping people.
And even though people in this town might think that's stupid, I still
choose to believe in it. All I ever did was try to be your friend, Stan. But

87
July 26, 2000.
"Super Best Friends "
 331

you're so high and mighty you couldn't look past my religion and just be
my friend back. You got a lot of growin' up to do, buddy.

What matters about Gary's religion is not whether its founding stories are factually true,

but whether or not that religion helps him and his family be good people and live decent

lives. By that measure, Mormonism earns high marks not only from the character, but

from the South Park creators as well.

South Park is hardly a reliable source for the fine points of Mormon history and

theology, but it is an important departure from the vast majority of images of the Latter-

day Saints created and consumed by non-Mormon Americans between 1890 and 2008.

Regardless of whether the representations were based on correct facts, throughout the

twentieth-century Americans routinely presented the Saints as one-dimensional people in

a one-dimensional community. The predominant stereotypes presented the Mormons as

bad when dealing with the controversial belief in ongoing revelation from which sprung

the practices that also frequently drew non-Mormons' notice: polygamy and repressive

sexual mores, violence, and Church leaders' supposedly theocratic involvement in

members' political, economic, and social lives. The Saints were good American

Mormons in situations where they set aside their peculiar religious beliefs and practices

in the public sphere to support national projects such as the settlement of the Western

frontier, World War I, the recovery from the Great Depression, World War II, and the

Cold War. Such limited constructions treated individuals' actions, limited practices, or

isolated events as representations of the whole of Mormon faith and culture, and

throughout the twentieth century negative stereotypes outweighed positive portrayals. But

at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in spite of the persistence of one-dimensional

stereotypes and non-Mormon fears about the Latter-day Saints' place in American

culture, some Americans were beginning to imagine the Latter-day Saints as complex

individuals in a diverse society. The growing number of such representations is a sign

that, nearly 120 years after the Manifesto that ended polygamy, non-Mormon Americans

are ready to take the next step in letting the Mormons Americanize and become just one

more member of the nation's diverse society.

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 Curriculum Vita

Cristine Hutchison-Jones
66 South Hobart St., Apt. 1, Brighton, MA 02135
857-488-5289 [email protected]

Education
Boston University, Boston, MA
PhD, Division of Religious and Theological Studies, Religion and Society,
expected May 2011
Dissertation: "Reviling and Revering the Mormons: Defining American Values, 1890—
2008"

Comprehensive Exams: History of World Religious Traditions (March 2007); History of

Religion in the United States (July 2007); Subject Exam: Mormonism, Anti-Mormonism,
and the History of Religious Intolerance in the United States (October 2007)

Boston University Women's Guild Scholarship, 2010

Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL

BA, American and Florida Studies and Religion, 2001
Thesis: "John Cobb's Christian Ecotheology: A Response to the Environmental Crisis"

Magna cum laude with honors; Religion Department Outstanding Graduate; Phi Beta
Kappa; Golden Key National Honor Society; Florida Academic Scholars Award (Bright
Futures Full Scholarship), 1997-2001

Teaching Experience
Instructor
Department of Religion, Boston University
RN 104, "World Religions: Western," Summer 2011

Graduate Writing Fellow

Writing Program, College of Arts and Sciences, Boston University
WR 100, "Writing Seminar," Fall 2009, Fall 2010, Spring 2011
WR 150, "Writing and Research Seminar," Spring 2010
Topic: "Defining 'America': Representations of Race and Religion in the United States'

Designed and taught freshman writing course on representations of minorities in

American culture that explores images in various media of Catholics, Mormons, and
African Americans from the early nineteenth century to the present.
 354

Teaching Assistant
Department of Religion, Boston University
RN 106, "Death and Immortality" with Professor Stephen Prothero, Spring 2006
RN 103, "World Religions: East" with Professor M. David Eckel, Fall 2005
RN 101, "The Bible" with Professor Peter S. Hawkins, Fall 2003

Led discussion groups, graded papers and exams, lectured occasionally, coordinated
course logistics, developed and maintained course Web sites.

Publications
"Center and Periphery: Mormons and American Culture in Tony Kushner's Angels in
America." In Peculiar Portrayals: Mormons on the Page, Stage, and Screen, edited by
Mark T. Decker and Michael Austin. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2010.

Book Reviews
Prema Kurien, A Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of an American
Hinduism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). Sociology of Religion:
A Quarterly Review 70, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 202-203.

Presentations
"Saving the Mormons: Victims and Villains in Popular American Westerns, 1890-1920."
"Mormons in Popular Media," Mormon History Association Annual Conference, St.
George, UT, May 28, 2011.

Invited Chair of panel session, "Cartoonists and Muckrakers: Selected Media Images of
Mormonism at the Turn of the Century." Mormon History Association Annual
Conference, St. George, UT, May 28, 2011.

"Putting Park51 in Context: Religious Intolerance in American History." Invited member

of panel discussion, "The 'Ground Zero Mosque' Controversy: What You Need to
Know," Department of Religion, Boston University, September 16, 2010. Available
online at http://www.bu.edu/buniverse.

"Saint, Sinner, or Catholic?: The Rhetoric of Anti-Catholicism in the Beecher-Tilton

Scandal." "Religion and Perceptions of Modem America," American Society of Church
History Winter Meeting, San Diego, CA, January 9, 2010.
 355

"Mystic Saint and Fallen Woman: The Rhetoric of Anti-Catholicism in the Beecher-
Tilton Scandal." "Saints, Cities, and Scandals: Directions in Catholic Studies," North
American Religions section, American Academy of Religion Annual Conference,
Montreal, Quebec, Canada, November 2009.

"Constructing America's Religious Identity: Treatments of Mormonism in Scholarly

Surveys of Religion in the United States." 'Mongrel' America, American Studies
graduate conference, University of Texas at Austin, October 3, 2008.

Invited respondent to paper, "America and the Movies: What the Five Academy Award
Nominees for Best Picture Tell Us about Ourselves," delivered by Drew Trotter,
President of the Center for Christian Study, Charlottesville, Virginia. Boston Theological
Institute, Boston, MA, February 23, 2008.

"The Nature of Evil: Philip Pullman's Engagement of John Milton's Paradise Lost in His
Dark Materials." Invited member of panel discussion, "Religion in Philip Pullman's His
Dark Materials," Department of Religion, Boston University, December 4, 2007.

"Center and Periphery: The Place of Mormonism in American Culture in Tony Kushner's
Angels in America." Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association
Annual Conference, Boston, MA, April 6, 2007.

"Governing Appetites: Thirst, Hunger, and Religion in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight and
New Moon." Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association Annual
Conference, Boston, MA, April 2007. Proposal accepted for panel on "The Vampire in
Literature, Culture, and Film," but not delivered due to conference limit of one
presentation per person per meeting.

Invited Classroom Lectures

"The Book of Mormon: American Scripture." RN 100, "Introduction to Religion,"
Professor Christopher I. Lehrich. Boston University, College of Arts and Sciences,
February 28, 2011.

"Mormons and American Representations of Mormonism." RN 100, "Religion and

Culture," Per Smith, Instructor. Boston University, Metropolitan College, July 22, 2008;
March 24, 2009.

Miscellaneous
"Keepin' the Faith." Hosted by Steve Shoemaker. WILL AM 580, Illinois Public Media.
Guest host Carly Nix. May 24, 2009. Available online at
http://will.illinois.edu/keepinthefaith/.
 356

Related Work Experience

Graduate Tutor, Fall 2009
Boston University, College of Arts and Sciences, Writing Program
One-on-one tutoring for students enrolled in WR 100 and WR 150. Intensive tutoring
with students referred by instructors, working on basic issues of grammar, argumentation,
and ESL challenges.

Research Assistant, September 2008-April 2009

Boston University, Department of Religion
Provided research and editorial assistance to the Chair of the Department, the Director of
the graduate Division of Religious and Theological Studies, and other faculty on an as-
needed basis.

Program Coordinator, January 2002-May 2009

Boston University, Department of Religion, Luce Program in Scripture and
Literary Arts
Administration and event coordination; supervision of progress of 15-20 graduate
students. Co-authored yearly activity reports for the Henry R. Luce Foundation; in fall
2004, co-authored proposal that resulted in three-year grant from 2005 to 2008. In 2006,
oversaw redesign of Program Web site (www.bu.edu/luce), including rewrite of all site
content. Until August 2008, provided research and editorial support for Program Director
Peter S. Hawkins.

Program Coordinator, January 2002-November 2004

Boston University, Division of Religious and Theological Studies
Provided part-time administrative and clerical assistance to Chair and Department
Administrator.

Professional Memberships
American Academy of Religion
American Historical Association
American Society of Church History
Mormon Historical Association

Teaching and Research Interests

American Religious History
Protestant Christianity in the US
Religious Intolerance in the US
Mormonism in the US
Catholicism in the US
African-American Religion
References
Stephen Prothero, Professor of Religion
Boston University
Department of Religion
145 Bay State Road
Boston, MA 02215
617-353-4426
protherofgtbu.edu

Jon H. Roberts, Tomorrow Foundation Professor of American Intellectual History

Boston University
Department of History
226 Bay State Road
Boston, MA 02215
617-353-2557
robertsl (Sibu.edu

Terryl Givens, James A. Bostwick Chair of Literature and Religion

University of Richmond
Department of English
28 Westhampton Way
University of Richmond, VA 23173
804-289-8303
[email protected]

Joseph Bizup, Assistant Dean

Boston University
College of Arts and Sciences
Writing Program
730 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215
617-358-1500
[email protected]

Peter S. Hawkins, Professor of Religion and Literature

Yale Divinity School
409 Prospect Street
New Haven, Connecticut 06511
203-432-5331
[email protected]