IN 1887 THE UNITED STATES CARRIED OUT AN ASTONISHING ACT. A NATION founded upon the principle of religious freedom, which had enshrined that principle in its Constitution’s Bill of Rights, passed a law that dissolved a church. The denomination involved, the LDS Church, was, as the historian Martin Marty has written, “safely describable as the most despised large group” of the day.
That year the Edmunds-Tucker Act added teeth to the 1862 Morrill Act, which had first raised the threat of suspending the church and limited its property holdings to $50,000. But that act was not enforced. The Edmunds Act of 1882 took direct aim at ending polygamy, and the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 went far beyond authorizing “polyg hunts”: it set out to destroy the church’s temporal kingdom. The 1887 law provided for the dissolution of the corporation of the church under direction of the U.S. attorney general, with its property to be disposed of by the secretary of the Interior Department.
Ironically Edmunds-Tucker also abolished woman’s suffrage in Utah. (Utah women received the franchise again with passage of the state’s first constitution in 1895.) The territory’s women had originally won the right in 1870 and were the first in the nation allowed to cast votes. According to the scholars Claudia and Richard Bushman, “the New York Times had suggested that granting suffrage to women, enabling them to vote out polygamy, would solve the Utah problem.” In fact, it made no difference; support of LDS polygamy doctrine was certainly not limited to the men.
Early Mormonism had spawned some powerful, independent women. Martha Hughes Cannon, for example, worked her way through the church’s University of Deseret setting type for an early Mormon feminist publication, the Woman’s Exponent. She went on to graduate from the University of Michigan School of Medicine. A plural wife and mother of three, she later became the first woman state senator in the United States, and she would sniff saltily in an 1896 San Francisco Examiner interview that a plural wife most certainly was not enslaved by her husband. “If her husband has four wives, she has three weeks of freedom every month.” A Democrat, she had just defeated her Republican husband and other candidates for a seat in the first Utah state senate.
In the crises developing a decade before statehood, church authorities had seen the escheat coming. Earlier still, Brigham Young had sometimes secretly arranged for leaders to hold church properties to avoid the threat of government confiscation. Now President John Taylor worked to circumvent Edmunds-Tucker, passing title of properties to members who would hold them as trustees for the church, to specially created separate nonprofit organizations, or to ward and stake organizations, and selling or transferring other holdings to individuals or associations on the understanding that they would retain them for later church use.
President Taylor had been severely wounded by the mob that murdered the prophet Joseph Smith at Carthage Jail in 1844, and to his dying breath Taylor, living in hiding as an outlaw, held fast to the spiritual necessity of the founder’s polygamous ideal in the face of persecution. The Edmunds-Tucker law went into effect the day after Taylor was placed in his grave in 1887. A court receiver was appointed, and intense legal maneuvering followed as a legal challenge was fought to the Supreme Court. In Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints v. the United States, the high court passed down a 5–4 decision on May 19, 1890, in support of the government action. The majority opinion stated: “Congress had before it—a contumacious organization, wielding by its resources an immense power in the Territory of Utah, and employing those resources and that power in constantly attempting to oppose, thwart and subvert the legislation of Congress and the will of the government of the United States.”
The Edmunds and Edmunds-Tucker Acts had disenfranchised all polygamists. In addition, the territorial government of Idaho passed a law requiring voters to take an antipolygamy oath: they had to swear that they did not belong to any organization that believed in or taught the principles of polygamy. The Davis v. Beason case from Idaho, also decided by the Supreme Court in 1890, upheld that law despite LDS arguments grounded in the First Amendment’s clause guaranteeing the “free exercise” of religion. The Court called polygamy and bigamy “crimes by the laws of the civilized and Christian countries.”
Polygamy was the catalyst for change in the LDS Church, and the issue that rallied the country, but for some the deeper issue was political. Senator Frederick T. Dubois of Idaho wrote in his autobiography, “Those of us who understand the situation were not nearly so much opposed to polygamy as we were to the political domination of the Church. We realized, however, that we could not make those who did not come actually in contact with it, understand what this political domination meant. We made use of polygamy.”
The United States could not accept a quasi-independent nation-state in its midst, an independent theocratic kingdom, or a secular government on paper behind which stood a shadow church government that determined its laws and lawmakers, or a court system in which religious authority decided secular disputes. Gentiles in Utah were outsiders, and if they were vigorously critical, they were suspect. “LDS publications applauded physical attacks on anti-Mormons until 1889, the year the First Presidency also publicly abandoned its ideals of a political theocracy,” D. Michael Quinn wrote.
The key word, perhaps, is “publicly” abandoned. The church wanted statehood in large part because Utah would essentially run its own affairs as a state, whereas the federal government and its appointees had considerable latitude in running a territory. Gentiles in the Intermountain West and across the country fought statehood, fearing that with a clear Mormon majority obediently following the church’s direction, the church would control the secular affairs of Utah as well as those of nearby areas with a significant LDS population. Mormons, after all, had followed the commands of Joseph Smith and then Brigham Young in politics as well as belief, and it was not unreasonable to assume they would continue to obey their leaders’ dictates.
But if the jails were full of polygamists, LDS leaders were imprisoned or underground, and the church was threatened with loss of its property, how long could the church withstand the pressure? With Edmunds-Tucker, the LDS Church had been brought to its knees. Even many non-Mormons felt that some of the act’s punishments were unfair. In his private journal, Taylor’s successor, President Wilford Woodruff, wrote, “I am under the necessity of acting for the temporal salvation of the church.” A year and a half after he assumed office Woodruff announced an “official declaration” accepting obedience to federal law and announcing the end of the polygamy practice. This declaration of September 25, 1890, soon known as the “Manifesto,” was unanimously “sustained” by General Conference vote on October 6, but the legal wrangling over it was to continue for years.
Historian Klaus J. Hansen maintained that “the Manifesto clearly was primarily a tactical maneuver to save not only the church but if possible the political kingdom as well.” The church was in the process of giving up not only polygamy but economic and political separatism, and in return it was poised to swim toward the American mainstream. Signaling the shifting political ground, Woodruff, the church’s fourth president, was the first to refrain from having himself anointed theocratic “King over Israel on the Earth.” In 1894 Utah began to form a state government, and statehood arrived at last in 1896.
Between 1894 and 1896 the church received its properties back, or what was left of them after the dispersal. Obviously church finances had taken a severe beating, worsened by the prolonged national depression of the 1890s. Tithing income from members, of which only one-third had been paid in cash rather than goods, had been worth about $500,000 annually through the 1880s but dropped by more than one-third in 1890. At the same time the church had high legal expenses and was also trying to assist the families whose heads were imprisoned; about 1,300 were serving sentences ranging from several months to several years. An additional complication had been the necessity of running the church from the underground, using trusted nonpolygamists as go-betweens.
During the years of receivership Temple Square was leased by the church from the federal government at a token $1 a month. The great Salt Lake Temple, forty years in preparation, held an open house for non-Mormons on April 5, 1893, and was dedicated for Mormon use the next day. It served as a great symbol of unity and triumph for an institution undergoing a difficult period of transition. At the same time the national organization was borrowing funds from regional and local divisions, such as stakes, to stay operational. By 1898 it had $3.36 million in obligations, much of that owed to bankers outside of Utah. Lorenzo Snow, who succeeded to the church presidency in 1898, resolved to put the church on a firm financial footing. When the prophet’s nephew Joseph F. Smith became church president in 1901, he continued Snow’s policies by reemphasizing the importance of the tithe and moving toward cash rather than in-kind contributions, issuing $1 million in bonds to pay indebtedness, and divesting the church of some unprofitable business ventures.
Rudger Judd Clawson, the first polygamist convicted and imprisoned by the federal government, was ordained an apostle in 1898 and served as the church’s accountant over this period. Clawson had originally earned his living as a bookkeeper for his brother’s wholesale dry goods business. While serving his prison sentence he earned money by teaching bookkeeping classes to fellow inmates at $.25 a lesson or sixty lessons for $15, earning $500 toward the support of his own family. (He considered this a bargain: he had paid $45 for the same course.)
Clawson reported to President Snow: “Deducting the entire active assets of the Church at that time…left a balance of indebtedness of $1,222,475.89…. It would have been a clear case of bankruptcy but in the providences of the Lord, the possible did not happen.” Stake presidents and bishops were called to Salt Lake City for an April 1899 conference with one topic on the agenda: tithing. It was estimated that in 1890 only 17.2 percent of members were tithe-payers. President Snow traveled around preaching and exhorting members to tithe, and by 1901 the number had jumped to nearly 30 percent. The early years of the twentieth century were prosperous, and with the increased tithing receipts, which now were arriving mostly as cash, the divestiture of some church business ventures, and conservative fiscal policies, the church had paid off every dollar of its indebtedness by 1905. Tithing had for some time been officially linked to temple recommends, the required permission in order to participate in sacred temple activities; in 1910, under President Joseph F. Smith, that tithing requirement began to be strictly enforced.
The economy of the region, meanwhile, was changing significantly. The railroad, as expected, brought in non-Mormon influences, commercial and otherwise, and firmly tied the Great Basin economy to the nation at large. Edmunds-Tucker had dissolved the Perpetual Emigrating Company and seized its assets, but emigration had already slowed to a trickle. Economic conditions in England and Scandinavia had improved relative to Utah, and church authorities began to encourage Saints to build the Lord’s Zion wherever they already lived rather than to gather in the Intermountain West. Discouragement of foreign immigration began in the 1890s and became official policy with a 1907 First Presidency pronouncement, which was reiterated in 1921, again in 1929, and as recently as 1999. There was also some out-migration within the United States among Saints seeking economic opportunity beyond the Great Basin.
Mining, largely in non-Mormon hands, increased in economic significance, as did other non-Mormon commercial interests. Church authorities lifted their boycott against Gentile businesses in 1882; the communal cooperative movement had largely died or been turned over to private interests. An increasing number of enterprises were independently owned and operated for profit by private Mormon members, ordinary businesses not directly controlled by the church.
The church’s principal divestitures, begun by Snow and continued by Smith, included the sale of the Deseret Telegraph System to Western Union; the Utah Sugar Company (although the church retained the majority stock interest); Utah Light and Railway Company (later part of the Utah Power and Light Company); the Saltair resort and recreational companies; and various mining properties, including iron and coal claims near Cedar City. The church retained some basic activities in hydroelectric power, transportation, and beet sugar manufacturing, as well as some mining ventures. Certainly the church continued as an economic influence in the Intermountain West through the twentieth century and eventually became an institution of quite considerable wealth. But the balance between sacred and secular had permanently shifted by the turn of the century. As Leonard Arrington put it in Great Basin Kingdom:
With these sales, and with the abolition of tithing in kind in 1908, the self-sufficient Kingdom may be said to have been brought to an end. A more acceptable adjustment between spiritual and secular interests was attained. And with this adjustment, the church no longer offered a geographic and institutional alternative to Babylon. Faith became increasingly separated from community policy, and religion from society. Individualism, speculation, and inequality—once thought to be characteristics of Babylon—were woven into the fabric of Mormon life.
No longer an economically self-sufficient kingdom or a controlling regional monopoly, the church began to reinvest in businesses after 1907 once it was out of debt. It regained control of the Provo Woolen Mills, the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, and the Beneficial Life Insurance Company, constructed the elegant Hotel Utah in downtown Salt Lake City, reacquired ZCMI stock, and maintained control of Zion’s Savings Bank & Trust Company, the Deseret News newspaper and bookstore, and the Salt Lake Theater, as well as stock in some other companies. The times were prosperous, and it seemed that a conservative investment policy could help ensure church income in leaner times.
After President Woodruff’s Manifesto, the church also prepared for the adjustment to secular politics. In 1891 the church dissolved the People’s Party, the Mormon vehicle that had dominated Utah politics for two decades. Members were told to choose between the national Republican and Democratic Parties. Initially people felt more affinity for the Democrats, since the Republicans had launched the polygamy wars and had more frequently placed obstacles in Utah’s road to statehood. Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, had signed the 1896 act that gave Utah statehood. But President Joseph F. Smith was a Republican, as was Utah’s first powerful U.S. senator, Reed Smoot. Through the twentieth century Mormons increasingly have felt more at home with the Republicans’ business-oriented economic policy, resistance to centralized federal government, and conservative social philosophy. Though typically Republican, LDS voting patterns were no longer simplistically monolithic, and the church’s lobbying was limited largely to issues on which it felt moral truths or its religious interests were directly at stake.
But there were some early bumps in the political road. In the early years, predictably, the church wanted a say in the choice of men who would be sent to Washington. In June 1895 the Democrats nominated B. H. Roberts, a third-echelon General Authority as a member of the First Council of the Seventy, to be the first Utah congressman, and Moses Thatcher, one of the Twelve Apostles, for U.S. senator. At the October General Conference Joseph F. Smith, then the second counselor in the First Presidency, openly rebuked his two lesser colleagues for not having cleared their candidacies in advance with the church. Both men lost the November election five weeks later.
The following February the First Presidency issued a “political manifesto” requiring General Authorities to sign a statement that they would seek church approval first before seeking public office. Both Roberts and Thatcher refused to sign and were suspended from ecclesiastical office. Roberts, believing such a requirement was a basic infringement of his civil rights, capitulated just hours before a deadline of March 24, 1896, signed the manifesto, wrote a letter of apology to the First Presidency, and was reinstated. Thatcher was more stubborn: he refused to sign, was expelled from the Quorum of Twelve, and barely evaded excommunication.
Roberts, probably the most interesting intellectual ever to achieve appointment as a General Authority, ran for the U.S. House of Representatives again two years later, this time with church clearance, and won with a 7,000-vote margin. But he never was allowed to take his seat in the House. A polygamist who openly continued to cohabit with three wives, one of them possibly married after the Manifesto, Roberts aroused anti-Mormon, antipolygamist emotions to a new fever pitch around the country. Opposition groups ranged from the Protestant Ministerial Alliance of Utah to the League for Social Service.
William Randolph Hearst’s New York Evening Journal conducted an effective anti-Roberts crusade, including a serial publication of Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes mystery, A Study in Scarlet, retitled Mormons: The Curse of Utah. The paper also ran an extensive series of non-fiction articles filled with research by the flamboyant Charles Mostyn Owen. Underlying the furor was the suspicion that church authorities were hiding new, post-Manifesto marriages. In fact they were, as shown by the well-documented research of recent historians, including B. Carmon Hardy and D. Michael Quinn.
A petition that claimed to have seven million signatures protesting the seating of Roberts was presented to the speaker of the House—twenty-eight scrolls wrapped in an American flag (and probably including some duplicate signatures as well as the signatures of children). When a vote was taken after hearings, Roberts lost 268–50. A monogamous Mormon Democrat, William H. King, later took his seat. Roberts continued to speak out and over the years frequently took Democratic stands not popular with Mormon leadership.
The next case splashed in national headlines was that of Reed Smoot, a member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1903. Clergy have occasionally won seats on Capitol Hill, but to this day Smoot is the only person to serve simultaneously in the Congress and as a high governing authority of a major religious body. As with Roberts, organized opposition spread from the Salt Lake Ministerial Association and other non-Mormon Utahns across the country, with charges that Mormons, possibly including Smoot himself, were still practicing polygamy. The claim was true for Mormonism, but false for Smoot. Hearings dragged on until 1907, with more than 3,000 pages of testimony, though Smoot was allowed to occupy his seat throughout those years.
The church itself was on national public trial along with Reed Smoot. The Manifesto itself had said nothing about whether cohabitation with pre-Manifesto wives would continue. Five days after publishing the declaration, Woodruff had told his apostles, “This Manifesto only refers to future marriages, and does not affect past conditions. I did not, could not and would not promise that you would desert your wives and children. This you cannot do in honor.” Whatever the law provided, many Americans felt that was reasonable, and pre-1890 polygamists were rarely prosecuted.
In March of 1904 Church President Joseph F. Smith was called to testify. He was an open polygamist with six pre-Manifesto wives (one divorce) and an eventual total of forty-eight children, thirteen of them post-Manifesto. He assumed the tacit amnesty toward pre-Manifesto commitments, though in 1906 he was to be convicted of unlawful cohabitation and fined $300.
Before Congress Smith was candid about his own continuing cohabitation but flatly denied all new post-Manifesto marriages by the church: “I know of no marriages occurring after the final decision of the Supreme Court of the United States on that question…and from that time till today there has never been, to my knowledge, a plural marriage performed in accordance with the understanding, instruction, connivance, counsel, or permission of the presiding authorities of the church, or of the church, in any shape, or form.”
Asked directly if he had personally performed or known of post-Manifesto plural marriages, Smith responded, “I never have.” Pressed by the chairman about reports of such LDS marriages being conducted in Mexico, Smith responded, “Nowhere on earth, sir.” The chairman repeated, “Do you know of any such?” Smith replied again, “No, sir; I do not.”
Enough was known about post-Manifesto plural marriages that Smith’s testimony and the evasiveness, contradictions, and inconsistencies of other church leaders’ appearances before the Senate committee left many Mormons queasy, Smoot discouraged, and non-Mormons more convinced than ever that the dissembling of LDS leaders amounted to outright deceit. According to Hardy, Apostle John Henry Smith’s memory losses on the stand were unusually impressive, and “Apostle Marriner W. Merrill, who took a plural wife in 1901, risked charges of perjury by submitting an affidavit in which he swore that he had taken no additional wives since the Manifesto.”
Some high church authorities suspected of post-Manifesto polygamy refused to respond to Senate requests to appear. One tired investigator, obviously a cynical Washington realist, finally declared he would prefer a “polygamist who doesn’t polyg” over all the “monogamists who don’t monog.” The Senate committee voted seven to five against seating Smoot. When the issue reached the full Senate floor for debate, Senator James H. Berry of Arkansas dragged in the Mountain Meadows Massacre as an argument against seating Smoot. Smoot, so the implication ran, was a product of and responsible for an organization capable of horrors such as that. To Berry it mattered not at all that the tragedy had occurred four years before Smoot was born.
But the Utahn had some important non-Mormon supporters, including President Theodore Roosevelt, who let it be known that he thought Smoot should retain his seat. In the end the Senate could not muster a two-thirds majority vote to depose him, and Smoot went on to a thirty-year Senate career, rising to become the influential chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.
Entering the twentieth century, the church obviously wielded considerable political influence on its own turf, among its own people. But it was no longer a unified force across the board as its people struck out on their own in the secular political world and the give-and-take, locally and nationally, of political issues worked out in the real world of Babylon.
The polygamy issue that trailed Mormons into the twentieth century—and still does, owing to the continuing activities of the schismatic Mormon Fundamentalists—did not, could not, disappear instantly with Woodruff’s 1890 Manifesto. Mormon polygamy had been neither an alternative lifestyle nor a countercultural statement; it had been a commitment to the highest divinely revealed ideal. Those practicing the ideal were Mormonism’s elite. A church cannot change a central paradigm overnight. With the post-Manifesto writings of the theologically influential apostle James E. Talmage and others, “celestial marriage” has been redefined to mean “eternal marriage” and is completely divorced from plural marriage.
Continuing revelation is a central Mormon belief. The president of the church is sustained as its prophet, seer, and revelator. Some historians believe that Joseph Smith Jr.’s sure sense of his own religious authority, and his undeniable charisma, were key factors in the new church’s growth. People in a rootless, rapidly changing culture yearn for the security of an identity, of belonging to a cohesive community. The Mormon Church proclaimed certainty, the sure keys to eternal truth, and for decades polygamy had been one of those keys.
Each church president since Smith has also been a prophet whose revelations are authoritative. Most of the revelations are not sustained by the church General Conference to enter the “Standard Works” that carry permanent scriptural status along with the Bible, that is, the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. Though Mormon doctrine has evolved over the years and the prophets are never officially overruled or declared wrong, President Gordon B. Hinckley may have come close to doing just that in a 1998 interview on the Larry King Live television show. Despite the authority of both D&C 132 and the 1890 Manifesto in the Mormon scriptures, when asked about polygamy, Hinckley responded, “I think that it is not doctrinal.”
But was Woodruff’s declaration considered a revelation in 1890? There was nothing in the document itself to indicate its level of inspiration, no first-person voice of the Lord. It did not proclaim any doctrine, nor did it disavow previous doctrine. It simply stated that the practice was suspended under the circumstances. Significantly, the LDS leadership did not propose Woodruff’s 1890 Manifesto as a scriptural addition to Doctrine and Covenants until 1908, well after that omission had been repeatedly remarked on at the Smoot hearings and by journalists writing hostile magazine and newspaper articles. The critics were well aware that, at the same time, D&C 132, the revelation authorizing polygamy, remained a part of Mormon scriptures (and still is).
The first three of the Manifesto’s five short paragraphs were a denial of newspaper stories reporting on the Utah Commission’s forthcoming annual report. Woodruff, aware that a negative commission report could hamper the progress toward statehood, took pains to refute the press dispatches claiming there had been forty or so new plural marriages in the preceding months. The concluding two paragraphs asserted that “nothing in my teachings to the Church or in those of my associates, during the time specified…can be reasonably construed to inculcate or encourage polygamy,” and so church members should follow his example in submitting to the law. He concluded, “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.”
Among the apostles Woodruff consulted about the Manifesto before releasing it to the press were Franklin D. Richards and Marriner W. Merrill. During the time span discussed in the declaration, which denied that new plural marriages had taken place, Richards had performed ten of these ceremonies, and Merrill himself had taken a new plural wife.
The Manifesto and post-Manifesto activities left a large credibility gap noticed by non-Mormons as well as Mormons. Top church authorities themselves were divided. A number of apostles took post-Manifesto wives, four of them during Lorenzo Snow’s brief presidency alone (1898–1901). In the first three years of his presidency Joseph F. Smith helped plan the continuation of plural marriage, sending apostles to Canada and Mexico to establish avenues for plural sealings to be performed in those countries and advising apostles on how to duck subpoenas to testify in the Smoot hearings.
Eventually the uproar became so great that John W. Taylor (son of the late church president), who was Smith’s Canadian emissary, and Matthias Cowley, sent to oversee plural marriages in Mexico, were made scapegoats and resigned from the Quorum of Twelve Apostles in 1905. In 1911 Cowley was stripped of the right to exercise his priesthood privileges, and Taylor was excommunicated. Cowley’s full membership was restored in 1936 shortly before he died, and Taylor’s posthumously in 1965.
According to Quinn, the last post-Manifesto plural marriages known to and personally authorized by Joseph F. Smith took place in 1906 and 1907. In October 1907, not long after Smoot’s seat was validated by vote of the Senate, Anthony W. Ivins, who had conducted dozens of post-Manifesto plural marriages in Mexico, was sustained as apostle. Altogether, by Hardy’s count, 262 documented plural marriages involving 220 LDS men were solemnized and sealed between October 1890 and December 1910. The last child born of these unions arrived in 1931. Joseph F. Smith served as president of the church until 1918 and was followed by the last polygamous president, Heber J. Grant, who died in 1945. Grant’s three marriages were pre-Manifesto; his first and third wives died in 1893 and 1908; he continued living with his second wife, Hulda, who died in 1951. Grant pursued a fervid antipolygamous policy during his years as president.
Beyond the tight world of the General Authorities, Mormons and non-Mormons in Utah had problems reconciling contradictory public statements, denials, and observable facts, the latter including babies. The Gentile press, including the Salt Lake Tribune, and the church press, including the Deseret News, spilled rivers of ink in response to the issue, and the ink spilled across the print media nationwide.
From 1909 to 1911 the Tribune ran 119 articles on post-Manifesto polygamy, and the articles named (mostly accurate) names. As Hardy put it, “Much of the Salt Lake Tribune’s ferocity in those years was fueled by disgust that Mormon leaders would, while claiming their church to be the Lord’s special vessel of truth, so frequently corrupt it.”
If secrecy and false denials helped fuel the Mormon Fundamentalist movement, this also fed a negative media image. Aware of continuing plural marriages in the Mormon leadership, Protestant ministers in Utah rallied anti-Mormon support across the nation. Some of the attacks were largely accurate. In McClure’s magazine, Burton Hendrick described the use of Mexico and Canada for plural marriage ceremonies. Some of the articles were lurid and sensationalist. Sarah Comstock told her readers in Collier’s that in southern Utah the practice of polygamy was so widespread that letters were addressed “Brother L—and wives.” A piece by Alfred Henry Lewis for Cosmopolitan suggested that Mormons imported European female converts to become white polygamous slaves. When word of that reached Europe, Mormon missionaries faced some nasty mob action.
Post-Manifesto Mormons were in a situation analogous to that in Nauvoo. Polygamy was again secret, denied in public, and causing division inside the church itself. The high authorities, as well as the rank and file, included members who were uncomfortable with contorted evasions of truth. But what Hardy called “pretzled language” became common public discourse on the subject of plural marriage. Matthias Cowley could say in one breath, “I am not dishonest and not a liar and have always been true to the work and to the brethren,” and in the next breath, “We have always been taught that when the brethren were in a tight place that it would not be amiss to lie to help them out.”
Such deceit in the name of a higher perceived good was not invented by Mormons. Mental reservation in lying for a higher cause is probably as old as human history, but a heavy price is paid for it in terms of credibility. And Mormon tradition itself is contradictory on that point. D. Michael Quinn used the term “theocratic ethics” for the concept that truth as ordinarily conceived has a lower priority than obedience. He found Joseph Smith Jr.’s first written statement of this in his fruitless letter courting Nancy Rigdon: “That which is wrong under one circumstance, may be, and often is, right under another…. Whatever God requires is right, no matter what it is, although we may not see the reason thereof till long after the events transpire…. But in obedience there is joy and peace unspotted.” On the other hand, in 1990 Gordon B. Hinckley, then first counselor in the First Presidency, wrote a piece entitled “We Believe in Being Honest” for the church’s Ensign magazine, warning that when one uses falsehood and deception even in a worthy cause, it can spread “like a disease that is endemic.”
The credibility problem and the reality of post-Manifesto polygamous activities fueled anti-Mormon flames up to World War I. Mormons were as concerned about public relations then as they are now. The Improvement Era, precursor to the Ensign, rejoiced in 1904 when a major eastern trade publisher, G. P. Putnam & Sons, issued Scientific Aspects of Mormonism by N. L. Nelson, a Brigham Young University professor. Church authorities were less happy with the negative pieces published in 1910 and 1911 in such major national magazines as Pearson and Everybody’s Magazine. Pulp fiction had a heyday featuring sensationalized stock Mormon characters. From 1910 to 1915, however, Americana, which had carried earlier critical material on Mormonism, printed a series on church history by B. H. Roberts that was published later by the church as its six-volume Comprehensive History of the Church.
Tours of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, starting with its appearance at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, became a positive public relations vehicle for the church. In 1911 the choir toured the country, singing at Madison Square Garden in New York for ten days, performing concerts in twenty-five cities, and singing at the White House at the invitation of President and Mrs. William Howard Taft.
Back in Salt Lake City the first tourist kiosk opened on Temple Square in 1902; an octagonal building twenty feet across, it provided volunteer-guided tours and dispensed tracts and pamphlets. That first year about 150,000 non-Mormon tourists visited Temple Square to admire the great temple, visit the Tabernacle, and, perhaps, hear its famous choir and organ. The next year a larger tourist bureau was built; by 1906 free organ recitals in the Tabernacle had become a daily summer feature. The number of visitors grew each year; today it is in the millions.
By the time World War I approached, Mormons had more than tiptoed into Babylon, and Babylon had come to them. Within a decade of statehood, federal agencies operating in Utah included the Army and its Corps of Engineers, the Soil Conservation Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Geological Survey, the Reclamation Service, the Fish Commission, the Biological Survey, the Bureau of Agricultural Engineering, and the Smithsonian Institution. The federal government began to finance and construct vast irrigation projects beyond the capacity of the church’s resources. All this was in addition to private Gentile economic activities.
After statehood the patriotism of Utahns was so enthusiastic that Mormons were regarded as model Americans by the time World War I arrived. By then, authorized, new post-Manifesto marriages really were no longer being performed, and active press antagonism had faded. Mormon volunteers had participated in the Spanish-American War, and in World War I Mormons fulfilled more than their quota for enlistments, with more than 24,000 men in uniform, of whom 544 died. Mormons also oversubscribed their goal in Liberty Bond sales. Gradually, except in cheap fiction, the polygamous past was being forgotten.
As Mormons blurred into the multicultural American landscape, their kingdom paradigm shifted. In the nineteenth century the claims had been territorial, prescribing a geographic gathering to Zion. The Mormons had never been able to balance those territorial claims for the kingdom of God against the American secular society with its church-state separation. The problem, Thomas O’Dea wrote, was that “the Mormons never worked out consistently the political implications of their religious philosophy.” The separatism of Smith’s original nineteenth-century Mormonism, as in the O’Dea analysis, went beyond theocratic church government. It placed all areas of human activity within church control, under the all-encompassing authority of ecclesiastical leadership.
Joseph Smith’s scriptures had taught that the U.S. Constitution is divinely inspired (“And for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose” [D&C 101:80]). His kingdom of God claimed America for Zion, but Smith and Brigham Young never provided for the ambiguities and conflicts inherent in a theocratic kingdom that had to function somehow under a democratic umbrella.
Another major shift during this period was the waning of latter-day millennialism. Smith’s predictions had inspired Second Coming expectations among the Saints around 1890. The LDS scriptures also teach that the final judgment and salvation will come in the 7,000th year of earth’s “continuance, or its temporal existence” (D&C 77:6, 12). And Smith had told an 1843 General Conference that “there are those of the rising generation who shall not taste death till Christ comes.”
More recently, that logically led Apostle Bruce R. McConkie to figure in the 1979 edition of his influential Mormon Doctrine that the Second Coming of Christ “is not far distant.” But the millennial hope is muted among most of today’s Mormons and no longer tied to an expectation of the Lord’s return by a particular time. Former experiences like tongues-speaking are explained away and visions have become less frequent. The kingdom of God is the church, and before the Lord does return there will be chaos on earth and all earthly kingdoms will disintegrate. Then the church will be there, ready to provide order amid chaos. The survivalism in Mormon culture today—food storage and emergency kits—reflects the continued smoldering of some of the millennial embers.
Asked about this aspect of the faith, President Hinckley explained: “We’ve always been a practical people dealing with the issues of life. We’ve said that a religion that won’t help people in this life won’t do much for them in the life that comes. We believe that. And we don’t spend a lot of time talking about or dreaming about the millennium to come. We hope we’re preparing for it. We hope we’ll be prepared when it comes. We don’t know when it will happen. We’re not spending a lot of time on it. We’re doing today’s job in the best way we know how to do it.”
Still, millennial fascination survives into the twenty-first century, as evidenced by BYU professor Daniel C. Peterson’s 1998 book The Last Days, with commentary on 550 end times teachings of the General Authorities. And devoutly Mormon Columbia University historian Richard Bushman remarked that Hinckley played down the theme precisely because it is relevant, “not because it’s dying. If the President were to blink an eye toward Jackson County, Missouri, people would flow there. The belief is still potent, but it’s latent. That’s still our view of history. All that nineteenth-century stuff is still in our culture. The church could, in a flash, constitute a complete society.”
During the pre-statehood years in Utah, the Mormons’ identity as a people specially set apart was seasoned through shared beliefs and a sense of having lived through sacred history. But as the twentieth century progressed, the kingdom of God was no longer a geographic enclave, a theocratic political kingdom, or a nation-state within a nation. And at the dawn of the twenty-first century the kingdom increasingly is Mormonism as it exists in the diaspora outside the United States. Mormons are not just in Utah; they and their temples are everywhere. The kingdom is a church, a denomination with a very distinctive history, culture, and theology, but a denomination like any other, accepting the life of a normal religious group functioning within the ordinary boundaries of the secular world.