Review: Joseph White Musser: A Mormon Fundamentalist

 

Review by Doug Gibson

Polygamy sects in more modern times are full of negative reports. Girls being beaten by parents who want to marry much older men, young marriagable men cast out, becoming "lost boys" because the gray beards living the "principle" want young wives, murders the past couple of generations between rival groups; not to mention the more recent capture and incarceration of Warren Jeffs for multiple felonies.

It's interesting to read a short biography, Joseph White Musser: A Mormon Fundamentalist, Cristina M. Rosetti, 2024, University of Illinois Press. (Here's an Amazon link.) The book, Rosetti notes, is "For the Mormons who call Joseph W. Musser a prophet." It is a mostly favorable biography, not without good reason. Musser, born into a polygamous family in 1872, grew up well into adulthood within a church and Utah culture that considered polygamous unions as a key toward exaltation, or the highest perch in the afterlife. Musser had commuications, some personal, with apostles, stake presidents and others who fervently believed in polgamy; events that occurred well after the Manifestos that purpotedly ended polygamy. In fact, Musser claims in his autobiography that LDS Church President Lorenzo Snow invited him to marry his first plural wife in 1899, well after the First Manifesto. It's accepted today that plural marriage continued after the Woodruff Manifesto, including among apostles.

But after the second Manifesto in 1904, delivered by Church President Joseph F. Smith, Rosetti notes that a trajectory of evdents occurred that would eventually lead to Musser's excommunication and expulsion from the Utah's church's acceptance. He would lose his job and the fidelity of some of his wives. Most of his children did not embrace polygamy. But Musser stayed committed to polygamy and proudly took on the mantle of Mormon fundamentalist. He edited and wrote essays in more than one publication, primarily Truth. He achieved top ecclesiastical status as a polygamous leader, and was imprisoned for a short time after the Short Creed raid of the 1940s. That's ironic because his father, Amos, was jailed in the mid 1880s. As Rosetti notes, for the same crime as his son.

Musser never wavered from his beliefs, despite the material and familial dysfunction it caused. Rosetti notes that late in his life he had concerns about the autocratic rule of polygamous leader Leroy Johnson. This dysfunctional leadership would eventually lead to the modern evil of Warren Jeffs. But Musser is revered today by nearly all Mormon fundamentalists as a prophet, and his articles and pamphlets still read with devout interest. He also penned an autobiography.

As Rosetti notes, Musser was influenced by Lorin C. Wooley, another polygamist leader. He attended the Wooley School of the Prophets, which included teachings that Adam was our God and that he had three wives. As Musser's writing grew, he was another voice for several polygamous beliefs: that the Priesthood was more powerful than both the church and its leaders; that the conventional Mormon's belief in tithing was sinful, and did not represent a true law of consecration that would provide equally to all; and, also, that Mormonism's third prophet, John Taylor, had a received a revelation in 1886 that commanded the church never to give up polygamy.

These beliefs compiled by Rosetti in the book underscore why Mormon fundamentalism will likely never go away. It has its history. It has its revelations. It has its modern-day prophets. Musser fully believed that one day the world will be saved by a high council of polygamous leaders.

Only one chapter is dedicated to Musser's life. The rest of the books focuses on Musser's doctrinal writings and key tenants of Mormon fundamentalism. Shortly before his death, Musser was deemed "patriarch in the high priesthood" among polygamist largely lead by a chiropracter, Rulon Allred. Musser died in 1954. Rosetti appropriately notes his death as such: "In a time of significant change in the LDS Church, Mussers's life is an exemplary account of a Mormon who disagreed with the church's response to modernization."