100-plus years ago, Utah, Mormon Church sold lots of magazines for publishers

I read a Rolling Stones piece on the Kingston polygamy family. It’s a breathless piece. The subject is described as “America’s most twisted crime family.” (You can read it at http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/inside-the-order-one-mormon-cults-secret-empire-20110615.) Today’s polygamists are a muckraker’s dream, just as the current Mormon Church was 100-plus years ago. At the 2011 Mormon History Association meeting, a small “keepsake” book — courtesy of historians Michael Paulos and Kenneth L. Cannon II — was offered. “Cartoonists and Muckrakers: Selected Media Images of Mormonism During the Progressive Era” featured excerpts from 100-plus-year-old muckraking pieces against the Utah Mormons, those purveyors of polygamy, once paired with slavery as the “twin relics of barbarisms.”

Rolling Stone’s piece has nothing on these pieces. Here’s a sample of early 20th century progressive journalism as directed against The LDS Church and its chief henchman, its president, Joseph F. Smith:

• Cosmopolitan Magazine, No. 50, March, 1911, “Viper on the Hearth” — a three-part series: “The name of the viper — I take it from the mouth of the viper — is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It lies coiled on the country’s hearthstone, and on;y asks time to grow and collect a poison and a strength to strike. … True, the Mormon himself had place in my mind for what he was and is — one who prefers lust’s substance to love’s shadow and would sooner wallow than dream; but it was not until my visit to Salt Lake City that he and his religion dawned upon me for the national threat they really are …” (The author, Alfred Henry Lewis, was the most celebrated writer in America at that time). Lewis described the LDS prophet Joseph F. Smith as an evil mastermind over a weak-willed, easy-to-lead U.S. senator, fellow Mormon, Reed Smoot.

• McClure’s Magazine, in its January, 1911 article, “The Mormon Revival of Polygamy,” described the LDS church President Joseph F. Smith in this hyperbolic manner as a man who had revitalized polygamy to Utah two decades after the manifesto. It reads: “Even before 1901 polygamous households had been reestablished on a considerable scale, but with the succession of Joseph F. smith to the presidency of the church the restoration of old conditions became practically open. … All of Brigham’s successors have been mild-mannered souls, but President Smith is a man of violent passions; one could easily imagine him torturing heretics or burning witches to advance the kingdom of God.” (The writer of this piece was Burton J. Hendrick, who later in his career would win three Pulitzer prizes).

• Pearson’s Magazine ran a three-part expose on Mormonism beginning in the September 1910 issue. It was titled, “The Political Menace of the Mormon Church” and dealt with Smith, polygamy, and the church’s political power and wealth. It was penned by Richard Barry, a famous war correspondent of that era. An excerpt: “These 375,000 people have more political power than any million in the United States because they are a unit. There is little secession among them from the will of their leader. … This political force, compact, unreasoning, unpatriotic, unAmerican, has a curious character, at once sinister and serene. It is the backbone of the Mormon empire, which is an echo from the time that antedates the Christian era.”

It’s very interesting to read these examples of muckraking articles against the Mormon Church.

-- Doug Gibson

Originally published in 2011 at StandardNET (blogs)