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)

Isaac Russell, New York Times journalist, PR specialist for the Mormon Church

(Originally published at StandardBlogs in 2012)

At this year’s Mormon History Association conference in Calgary, two contributors, Michael Harold Paulos and Kenneth L. Cannon II, continued an annual practice of producing a keepsake booklet for attendees. This year’s booklet provided an abridgement of the Reed Smoot U.S. Senate hearings from Feb. 20, 1907, as well as a short feature on essays and correspondence provided by newspaperman Isaac Russell, both a Mormon and leading journalist in the first 20 years of the 20th century. In the booklet, the authors recount how Russell used his influence to recruit former President Theodore Roosevelt to harshly criticize a much publicized “magazine crusade” against the Mormon Church.

As the authors mention, Russell, whose jobs included a stint at the New York Times, was frustrated enough to write letters to magazines such as “Pearson’s,” “McClure’s,” and “Everybody’s,” who engaged in muckraking against the Mormons. In 1911, Russell, in what proved to be a brilliant public relations stroke, recruited the still very popular former President Theodore Roosevelt to criticize the muckrakers. In a long letter to Roosevelt, Russell claimed that the attacks against Mormonism in the magazines, which largely dealt with allegations of polygamy and theological power, originated from older stories, promoted by the anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune, which had circulated the accusations that Roosevelt — while president — backed Sen. Reed Smoot’s continued tenure in the Senate in exchange for the Mormons delivering the electoral votes of Utah, Idaho and Wyoming to Republicans in 1908.

Russell’s letter, carefully crafted, was designed to strike nerves within Roosevelt that were still boiling. The former president had always been angered by the allegations that he had bartered Smoot’s tenure for votes. For Roosevelt, Smoot not being a polygamist was enough for him to stay in the Senate. He was not convinced by charges from the Salt Lake Tribune and others that Smoot would be a puppet for Mormon President Joseph F. Smith while in the Senate.

To add pepper to Roosevelt’s anger, Russell reminded the former president that the current round of muckraking against Mormons in 1911 derived largely from charges made by Frank J. Cannon, who edited the Salt Lake Tribune when the corruption charges against Roosevelt were aired. At the time, Cannon, an excommunicated Mormon from a very prominent church family, was the leading critic of Utah, Joseph F. Smith and the Mormon Church. His series of charges in “Everybody’s” magazine would become a best-selling book and later he would make a fortune as a traveling anti-Mormon lecturer.

Roosevelt was no fan of Cannon, so placement of his name worked well for Russell’s purposes. The former president penned two letters to Russell. One was eventually published, as a letter to Russell, in “Collier’s Weekly” magazine, edited by Russell’s “good friend and sometimes-mentor, Norman Hapgood,” quotes the keepsake.

In the letter, Roosevelt, fervently and with outrage denies the accusations made in the muckraking pieces, calls the writers slanderers and also writes, “The accusation is not merely false, but so ludicrous that it is difficult to discuss it seriously. Of course, it is always possible to find creatures vile enough to make accusations of this kind. The important thing to remember is that the men who give currency to this charge, whether editors of magazines or the presidents of colleges, show themselves in their turn unfit for association with decent men when they secure the repetition and encouragement of such scandals, which they perfectly well know to be false.”

In an explanatory note after Roosevelt’s letter, Russell was able to get some digs in at the Salt Lake Tribune, which he accused of being run by a small group of persons feeding defamatory information about the Mormons to muckraking magazines across the country.

It was a brilliant feat of public relations produced by Russell, a very public limited approval of the Mormons by a popular former president and a public slap in the face to major magazines as well as to Cannon and other opponents of Russell’s church. As the authors of the keepsake write, it wasn’t all true. “Although Reed Smoot worried that Colonel Roosevelt would turn on the Mormons if he knew the truth about the continuation of polygamy, almost all other church leaders embraced” the Roosevelt letter.

The reaction from the muckrakers were less cordial. In Collier’s Weekly,” Harvey J. O’Higgins, who co-wrote Cannon’s anti-Mormon book, “Under the Prophet in Utah,” wrote a response to Roosevelt. It includes, “The machinery and discipline of the Mormon Church make the most perfect and autocratic church control of which we have any exact record. Because of this perfection of control, the new polygamy has been successfully hidden for these many years,” wrote O’Higgins.

With Roosevelt as an ally, however, Russell, and the Mormons had scored a battle victory over their adversaries. Church leaders were so pleased with Russell’s contacts and influence that he became, as the authors put it, a “secret press bureau” for the LDS Church in New York City, all while a full-time reporter for the New York Times. The keepsake provides examples of Russell’s Mormon press duties, including a couple of letters to his own newspaper, the Times, that he ghosted under the names of Eastern States LDS Mission presidents Ben E. Rich and Walter P. Monson.

In 1915, Russell received a personal letter from Joseph F. Smith, where the prophet tells Russell, “It is my sincere desire that you should continue as you are doing in defense of the truth and justice and the honor of your people, and always remember from whence you came while mingling with men who know not the truth but are given to following the customs and sins of the world.”

What a fascinating bit of history. Paulos and Cannon merit credit for bringing these candid tales, warts and all, of history, theology, journalism, spin and otherwise to interested readers.

The booklet keepsake, “Mormonism and the Politics of the Progressive Era,” is privately published by DMT Publishing, Salt Lake City. Copies are being provided to university libraries in Utah and other parts of the nation as well as to the LDS Church Historical Department.

--Doug Gibson