MORMONS

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, founded in New York state by Joseph Smith (1805–1844) in 1830, was the most controversial religion born in the United States during the religious revival of the early nineteenth century. Although the first half of its history was troubled, it is also the most successful religion to have originated in the Americas during the modern era. The period 1870–1920 marks the turbulent transition between the demonizing and the acceptance of Mormons (a nickname derived from their new scripture the Book of Mormon, published the year the church was founded). It also includes the religious, social, economic, and political transformation of the LDS church after 1890, when it took the first measures to give up the practice of plural marriage, or polygamy, under intense pressure from the federal government. That practice had become both its theological cornerstone and the object of the longest and most intense national campaign against any religious practice or organization in U.S. history.

THEOLOGY AND THEOCRACY

The controversy surrounding Mormons had to do in part with their claim to be the only "true and restored" church of Jesus Christ (after centuries of "apostasy" in the institutional history of Christianity) and to have a new scripture that they claimed held equal status with the Bible as the word of God. Joseph Smith said he was led by an angel to ancient inscribed gold plates and was instructed to translate them. In this "New World scripture," which charts a thousand years of history on the North American continent, Christ speaks after his resurrection to the ancient inhabitants of the Americas, descendants of lost tribes of Israel who left Jerusalem and sailed to the New World in 587 B.C., when the chronicle begins. Audacious in its theology and distinguishing itself as surely from traditional Christian sects as early Christianity had distinguished itself from ancient Judaism, Mormonism made America central to the Christian historical narrative, from the location of the Garden of Eden to that of the millennial Kingdom of God, charting a global scriptural geography that explained the origin of American Indians and that positioned Latter-Day Saints (members of the restored church) as essential to the work of human salvation. Although Mark Twain (1835–1910) called the Book of Mormon "chloroform in print," and though the books about the Mormon scripture were written predominantly by defenders and critics of its historical and religious claims and of its authorship, it is also one of the most significant and unusual texts of the nineteenth century, the most imaginative exemplar of what Harold Bloom has called "the American religion." Terryl Givens has argued that the Book of Mormon is "perhaps the most religiously influential, hotly contested, and . . . intellectually underinvestigated book in America" (By the Hand of Mormon, p. 6).

Even more than their beliefs and scripture, however, it was the Mormons' theocratic organization, territorial presence (first in Ohio and Missouri, and more autonomously and militarily in Illinois and finally Utah Territory), their economic communalism, and especially their practice of polygamy that elicited outrage, suspicion, and political tension. After they fled persecution in Illinois and settled the Salt Lake Valley, the Mormons established a theocratic range of settlements they called "Deseret," after a name in the Book of Mormon, that reached as far as southern California and to which converts, predominantly from Britain and Scandinavia, emigrated before the Civil War, without the benefit of the transcontinental railroad (completed in Utah in 1869). National outrage over the Mountain Meadows Massacre on 11 September 1857, during which a group led by Mormon leaders killed approximately 140 men, women, and children passing through southern Utah on their way to California, made the event a touchstone of U.S.-Mormon tensions for years to come. Adding to those tensions were stories of a secret Mormon militia of "Destroying Angels" or "Danites," which made their way into popular culture in 1881 in Joaquin Miller's very popular frontier melodrama, The Danites in the Sierras. As Mark Twain described them, they were "Latter-day Saints who are set apart by the Church to conduct permanent disappearances of obnoxious citizens" (p. 85). The truth in these stories lay in a Mormon belief in blood atonement, but the church organization was both less tyrannical and more communal than the popular American stories made it seem.

MARK TWAIN IN UTAH

While national attention on the Mormons diminished during the Civil War, they caught the attention of the young Mark Twain on his journey to Nevada with his brother in 1861. The literary embellishment of that experience is found in several chapters of his 1872 novel and travel narrative, Roughing It. Although wary of sensational journalism, Twain was an admirer of the tall tale, and the mysteries surrounding "the Mormon question," as he called it, were fertile ground for both fictional invention and journalistic skepticism. Of his short time in Salt Lake City, Twain said he and his party certainly acquired more information about the Mormons, "but we did not know what portion of it was reliable and what was not. . . . We were told, for instance, that the dreadful 'Mountain Meadows Massacre' was the work of the Indians entirely, and that the Gentiles had meanly tried to fasten it on the Mormons; we were told, likewise, that the Indians were to blame, partly, and partly the Mormons; and we were told . . . that the Mormons were almost if not wholly and completely responsible. . . . All our 'information' had three sides to it, and so I gave up the idea that I could settle the 'Mormon question' in two days. Still, I have seen newspaper correspondents do it in one" (pp. 116, 117).

Twain used hyperbole to tell a truth about the romantic fictions that shaped his own—and certainly his readers'—sense of exotic western lands. With his leveling satirical wit, he brought both Mormon religion and anti-Mormon mythologizing down to an appropriately human and outrageously humorous size. "There was fascination in surreptitiously staring at every creature we took to be a Mormon," he wrote. "This was fairyland to us . . . a land of enchantment, and goblins, and awful mystery. We felt a curiosity to ask every child how many mothers it had and if it could tell them apart." Twain wrote that because he and his party were there briefly, "we had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter." The reform movement against polygamy would last nearly another fifty years. Polygamy was decried by Americans intent on ending a practice inimical to Christian civilization, but Twain parodied that Christian reformist impulse and turned it against itself (at Mormon women's expense): "I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly, and pathetically 'homely' creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, 'No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure—and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence'" (pp. 97–98). Twain's characterization of Mormon women was one of many, collectively contradictory attempts in popular fiction and periodical cartoons to portray or explain polygamy through its "victims" (see Bunker and Bitton, pp. 123–126).

ANTIPOLYGAMY SENTIMENT IN LITERATURE AND LAW

Several Mormon church leaders had been practicing polygamy since 1841; in 1852 the church announced publicly its doctrine and practice of "the plurality of wives." (Mormon leaders called upon about 10 percent of the men to marry more than one wife; some refused.) In response, the antipolygamy reform movement was born and became, after antislavery, the most successful and widespread reform movement in the United States for the next half-century, spawning a literary genre to serve its purpose, the sensationalist antipolygamy novel. Drawing on the conventions of the captivity narrative, over one hundred such books were published in the United States—most of them claiming historical authenticity. Some sold more than 100,000 copies, such as Mrs. A. G. Paddock's The Fate of Madame La Tour: A Tale of the Great Salt Lake(1881). The practice was the chief reason that Utah was not admitted to the Union, despite several petitions over five decades. (A recurring counterpetition to amend the U.S. Constitution to prohibit polygamy never succeeded.) The analogy with slavery (the other "twin relic of barbarism") turned on the question of Mormon women's consent, imagined to be as nonexistent as a slave's. Hence one of the conventions of the antipolygamy novel had a Mormon man either abduct or mesmerize a soon-to-be plural wife. The comparison also had sectional resonance, given the burning antebellum questions of states' rights and of whether western territories would be slaveholding or free. In her preface to the antipolygamy novel by Mrs. Stenhouse, Tell It All (1874), Harriet Beecher Stowe writes that now that "the slave-pens of the South have become a nightmare of the past, the hour is come to loose the bonds of a cruel slavery whose chains have cut into the very hearts of thousands of our sisters" (p. vi).

While Mormons identified Indians as descendants of ancient Hebrews, Americans often associated Mormons with a host of nonwhite and non-Christian peoples, nations, and religions: they were called "white Indians" and "white negroes," "the Islam of America," and "Confucians," among other appellations. These affiliations drew on the sense that polygamy was a non-Western, barbaric practice; that the presumed licentiousness driving polygamy implied that Mormon men had sexual drives like those ascribed to Africans or to Arab men in their harems; and that polygamy produced offspring with physical signs of racial degeneration. This racialization or casting of Mormons as non-Western also signaled one of the ideological ambitions of Manifest Destiny: conquest was justified in the battle between civilization and savagery. Seen not just as uncivilized but as a dire threat to American and Christian civilization itself, Mormons, Indians, and Asians (at times collective subjects of Western laws denying citizens' rights) could be viewed as more than just political rivals or targets: they could serve as foils for the highest ideals that the United States claimed to serve. The trope of captivity in popular antipolygamy fiction thus had national resonance—up to the silent film era and in the westerns of Zane Grey (1875–1939)—as a morally, even cosmically inflected dramatization of America's conquest and settlement of the West.

The Latter-Day Saints defended what they saw as their constitutional right to practice polygamy as a free exercise of religion; that right was put to the test when George Reynolds, a secretary to the second president of the church, Brigham Young (1801–1877), was tried and convicted of bigamy and appealed his case, which eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court. Reynolds v. United States (1878) was the first Supreme Court case to determine the legal meaning of a provision in the First Amendment. In siding with the federal system and against the domestic relations of local majorities, and in delimiting the meaning of "religion" in a religiously biased manner, Reynolds became one of the more controversial Court decisions in American history and has never been overturned.

After Brigham Young's death, two pieces of congressional legislation, the Edmunds Act of 1882 and the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, further eroded Mormon freedoms and spelled the demise of polygamy: the United States abolished the Mormon militia, disincorporated the Mormon Church (escheating most of its properties to the government), abolished female suffrage (a niece of Brigham Young's was the first American woman to vote), disenfranchised polygamists, and compelled wives to testify against their husbands. Prosecution for polygamy was permitted without a complaint by a spouse, and voters in 1887 were required to swear to uphold the Edmunds Act, which prohibited even verbal encouragement of polygamy. In its enforcement of these laws, the government jailed over a thousand polygamous men.

In 1890 the Mormon Church president Wilford Woodruff issued a manifesto instructing church members to obey U.S. law, and in 1896 Utah's request for statehood was granted. The manifesto marked the beginning of the end of the most distinctive aspects of social organization and religious practice in nineteenth-century Mormonism—and most important for American literary and political history, it marked a shift in the church's relation to the United States.

POLYGAMY AFTER THE MANIFESTO, THE EARLY WESTERN, AND ASSIMILATION

Despite the manifesto, some members of the Mormon hierarchy continued to marry polygamously, and in the first decade of the twentieth century, as governmental investigations increased in response to rumors about the continued practice of plural marriage, organized citizens, members of Congress, and the press revisited former fears and dire pronouncements about the fate of the nation should polygamy be allowed to persist. As late as 1911, for example, Theodore Roosevelt warned that the continuation of polygamy would "secure the destruction" of the Mormon Church. Following the admittance of Utah to the Union, the election of two Mormons to Congress—B. H. Roberts (a practicing polygamist before 1890) to the House in 1898 and Reed Smoot (1862–1941) to the Senate in 1904—incited petitions, congressional investigations, and a flurry of articles and cartoons raising the alarm about the infiltration into the Senate of what were widely suspected to be puppets of the Mormon hierarchy. In the cartoon, "The Real Objection to Smoot," in Puck magazine on 27 April 1904, the Mormon hierarchy is represented by a large patriarchal figure whose coat is patched with "Resistance to Federal Authority," "Murder of Apostates," "Mountain Meadows Massacre," and other Mormon crimes, including, most prominently, "Polygamy." He dangles a puppetlike Smoot before the door to the U.S. Senate. Although antipolygamy fervor had briefly diminished in the 1890s, it returned in a virulent form: Could Mormons be trusted politically and morally? Unlike Roberts, Smoot kept his seat and the political accommodation of the Mormons began to take shape.

Culturally, antipolygamy sentiment resurfaced briefly in 1911 with articles in several magazines and arguably helped produce a best-seller in 1912, when Zane Grey published Riders of the Purple Sage, one of the most influential westerns (because of its formula, not its Mormon antagonists). Although Grey went on to write dozens of westerns—only a handful dealing with Mormons—Riders of the Purple Sage was his most successful novel and the only one to depict Mormon polygamy and what the hero Lassiter calls the Mormon "empire" as a soulless evil. One sign of the assimilation of the Mormon Church into the nation was that, as a result of Mormons' objection to depictions of them in some of Grey's novels and in many silent films, a congressmen from Utah offered a legislated tax deal to Fox Pictures in 1918 if Fox would agree to omit any reference to Mormons in subsequent film versions of Zane Grey novels. That same year, Willa Cather's My Ántonia was published, in which Mormons are alluded to in ways previously uncharacteristic: the narrator asserts that dirt roads bordered with sunflowers—believed to have been planted by Mormon pioneers along the trail as they fled persecution—for him represent the roads to freedom. Perhaps alluding to the catastrophe of imperial collisions in World War I, the novel also depicts two bulls constantly ramming their heads together. Their names are "Gladstone"—after the nineteenth-century British prime minister who argued for Irish home rule—and "Brigham Young."

see alsoAnnexation and Expansion; Courtship, Marriage, and Divorce; Frontier; Violence

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. 1918. Edited by Charles W. Mignon, with Kari Ronning. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

Grey, Zane. Riders of the Purple Sage. 1912. Introduction and notes by William R. Handley. New York: Modern Library, 2002.

Miller, Joaquin. The Danites in the Sierras. Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1881.

Stenhouse, Mrs. T. B. H. Tell It All: The Story of aLife's Experience in Mormonism. Hartford, Conn.: Worthington, 1874.

Switzer, Jennie Bartlett. Elder Northfield's Home; or,Sacrificed on the Mormon Altar. New York: J. Howard Brown, 1882.

Twain, Mark. Roughing It. 1872. Vol. 2 of The Works ofMark Twain. Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith and Edgar Marquess Branch. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Secondary Works

Alexander, Thomas G. Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-Day Saints, 1890–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Bagley, Will. Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and theMassacre at Mountain Meadows. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.

Bentley, Nancy. "Marriage as Treason: Polygamy, Nation, and the Novel." In The Futures of American Studies, edited by Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, pp. 341–370. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.

Brooks, Juanita. The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963.

Bunker, Gary L., and Davis Bitton. The Mormon GraphicImage, 1834–1914: Cartoons, Caricatures, and Illustrations. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983.

Firmage, Edwin Brown, and Richard Collin Mangrum. Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1830–1900. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Givens, Terryl. By the Hand of Mormon: The AmericanScripture that Launched a New World Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Givens, Terryl. The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Gordon, Sarah Barringer. The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Handley, William R. "Distinctions without Differences: Zane Grey and the Mormon Question." Arizona Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2001): 1–33.

Hardy, B. Carmon. Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

O'Dea, Thomas. The Mormons. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957.

Quinn, D. Michael. The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins ofPower. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1994.

Shipps, Jan. Mormonism: The Story of a New ReligiousTradition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.

William R. Handley