After First Manifesto, LDS internal debate over polygamy raged for a generation

In Official Declaration No. 1, found in the LDS scripture “Doctrine and Covenants,” then-Prophet Wilford W. Woodruff says, “…  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.” (Read) It’s taught today that the 1890 Manifesto ended polygamy within the LDS Church. That, however, is a pleasant fantasy. The debate over polygamy raged within the LDS Church’s hierarchy for another generation, and polygamous marriages were conducted, and sanctioned, within the church. The polygamy debate wasn’t settled until well into the 20th century, when two prominent apostles were harshly disciplined for not ceasing the practice.

The 1890 Manifesto was necessary as a means to end the federal government’s efforts to harm the church. In fact, for a while the church did not have control of its own funds, and it’s third prophet, John Taylor, had spent much of his tenure in hiding. As historian Kenneth L. Cannon notes in his excellent Sunstone of 1983, a majority of the 12 Apostles, including President Woodruff, intended polygamy to continue. What the First Manifesto meant to most LDS Church leaders through much of the 1890s was that the primacy of United States law took precedence over the church’s mandate to have plural marriage. To Woodruff and others, particularly his First Counselor George Q. Cannon, polygamy could continue outside the United States.

An example of post-First Manifesto plural marriage at the highest degree of the church hierarchy involves LDS Apostle Abraham H. Cannon, a son of George Q. Cannon. Abraham Cannon, already a polygamist, married at least one more plural wife in the mid-1890s, and probably two. One of his marriages, to Lillian Hamlin in 1896, was followed shortly by his death. Nevertheless, Lillian managed to conceive, bearing a daughter named Marba, which is Abram spelled backwards. In an interesting footnote, Lillian, a future teacher at the Brigham Young Academy, would marry and become a polygamous wife to Lewis M. Cannon, one of Abraham’s cousins. (This information is gleaned from the introduction to the published diaries of Abraham Cannon, which is fascinating reading. Abraham Cannon was a remarkable man, who in his relatively short life was an energetic apostle, hustling church duties with journalism responsibilities, business dealings, both personal and church, and maintaining relationships with his plural families with the threat of federal arrest and prosecution always around.)

So, as Kenneth Cannon writes, from 1890 to 1898, a significant majority of Apostles and members of the First Presidency had “an active part in post-Manifesto polygamy.” Plural marriages, those allowed, were usually conducted in Mexico or Canada. One reason for the perpetuity of the practice was, as mentioned, that a majority of the Quorum of the 12 Apostles still supported polygamy as a church practice. Cannon cites this as one reason that plural marriage increased during the tenure of LDS Prophet Lorenzo Snow from September 1898 to October 1901, even though Snow, Woodruff’s successor, opposed continuing polygamy. As Cannon writes, “… President Snow privately expressed the same sentiments to Apostle Brigham Young Jr., stating he had never given his consent for plural marriage and adding ‘God has removed this privilege from the people.’”

When Joseph F. Smith assumed responsibilities as LDS leader in 1901, he maintained an approval for some polygamous marriages. That was not a surprise, as Smith had not been a vocal opponent of polygamy. Nevertheless, Joseph F. Smith is the LDS Church leader who essentially enforced a ban on polygamy, and made its practice an offense that would lead to excommunication.  On April 6, 1904, at LDS General Conference, President Smith said the following:

“Inasmuch as there are numerous reports in circulation that plural marriages have been entered into, contrary to the official declaration of President Woodruff of September 24, 1890, commonly called the manifesto, which was issued by President Woodruff, and adopted by the Church at its general conference, October 6, 1890, which forbade any marriages violative of the law of the land, I, Joseph F. Smith, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, hereby affirm and declare that no such marriages have been solemnized with the sanction, consent, or knowledge of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“And I hereby announce that all such marriages are prohibited, and if any officer or member of the Church shall assume to solemnize or enter into any such marriage, he will be deemed in transgression against the Church, and will be liable to be dealt with according to the rules and regulations thereof and excommunicated therefrom.”

This Second Manifesto was also published in the church’s official publication of that time, “The Improvement Era.” Even this manifesto did not come close to ending internal debate over the legitimacy of polygamy. It continued through the decade, with its two strongest adherents being apostles John W. Taylor and Matthias Cowley. They led a faction that interpreted the Second Manifesto, as the First Manifesto, as only respecting U.S. law.

Nevertheless, polygamy’s days were numbered within the LDS Church. By 1911 both Taylor and Cowley were not only dropped from the Quorum of the 12 Apostles, but Cowley was disfellowshipped, which means he lost his LDS priesthood standing, and Taylor excommunicated, which is the maximum church punishment. (In 1936 Cowley’s priesthood was re-established. He died in 1940. In 1965, long after his death, Taylor was re-baptized posthumously and had his priesthood standing restored.)

So, what led to the eventual crackdown of polygamy in the LDS Church? As Kenneth Cannon notes in his article, attrition played a role. During the first decade of the 20th century, apostles who supported polygamy died, and Smith chose as replacements opponents of polygamy. By the end of the decade, the LDS Church hierarchy was strongly anti-polygamy.

But there was a bigger reason for President Joseph F. Smith to end polygamy. As Kenneth Cannon relates, LDS Apostle Reed Smoot, a monogamist, had been selected as U.S. senator from Utah. Polygamy threatened Smoot’s assumption of the Senate seat, which was considered of vital importance to Smith and other LDS leaders. Smoot was asking Smith and others to unseat Cowley and Taylor, and by mid-1906 they were gone from the Quorum. By 1907, and the death of apostle George Teasdale, there were no polygamy advocates left in the hierarchy.

Smoot’s ascension to the U.S. Senate was of such importance that President Joseph F. Smith, speaking to the U.S. Senate, provided testimony he must have known to be false, claiming that since the Woodruff Manifesto, “… there has never been, to my knowledge, a plural marriage performed with the understanding, instruction, connivance, counsel, or permission of the presiding authorities of the church, in any shape or form; and I know whereof I speak, gentlemen, in relation to that matter.” Such testimony, although skeptically received, helped Smoot survive efforts to deny him his senatorial seat. He would serve in the U.S. Senate until 1933.

In retrospect, it would have been impossible for polygamy, a practice entrenched in the Mormon church for nearly half-a-century, to have been instantly ended in 1890. It required a generation for attrition, changing times and church priorities to finally eradicate the principle.

-Doug Gibson

This post originally was published at StandardBlogs.

The prodigal Mormon apostle, Thomas B. Marsh

The “Milk and Strippings” story as it relates to Thomas B. Marsh, onetime top LDS apostle turned apostate who came to Utah almost 20 years later a broken, humbled, impoverished supplicant, is one of the pleasant semi-fictions of Mormon history. It probably isn’t completely untrue, but it seems a mostly unlikely fable, which follows: In Far West, Sister Marsh and Sister Harris agreed to share milk and so-called “strippings” in order to make more cheese. Sister Marsh kept too many of the “strippings.” Sister Harris complained to the ward teachers, who decided that Sister Marsh was in the wrong. There was an appeal and the bishop upheld the verdict. Thomas B. Marsh, the senior apostle, appealed to the High Council, who upheld the bishop’s verdict. Apostle Marsh then appealed to the First Presidency, who upheld the High Council. The story concludes with Marsh so angry over what he perceived as an affront to his wife, that, as Apostle George A. Smith relates, “With the persistency of Lucifer himself, he declared that he would uphold the character of his wife, ‘even if he (Marsh) had to go to hell for it.’” (It bears noting that Smith’s recollections are from the 1850s.)

So, Marsh eventually left the church, filed affidavits that Mormon paramilitary organizations were prepared to attack church opponents. According to authors Richard Van Wagoner and Steven C. Walker, writing in Sunstone, Vol. 6, No. 4, Marsh’s affidavit, which was co-filed by Orson Hyde, an apostle who later returned to the church, contributed to the extermination order of Mormons in Missouri, signed by Gov. Lilburn W. Boggs, and the Haun’s Mill massacre, where 17 Mormon men and boys were murdered.

Marsh’s apostasy was damaging to the church leaders. As A. Gary Anderson, writing for the website 1857massacre.com, notes, Joseph Smith “spent five months in jail as a result of the betrayal of Marsh and the others.”

Both the Sunstone piece and Anderson’s online essay, titled, “Thomas B. Marsh: Reluctant Apostate,” rely a lot on the “Milk and Strippings Story” to explain Marsh’s apostasy. Frankly, it seems ludicrous that a dispute over a pint of milk “strippings” would lead to such chaos. But that’s the point of the fable, to point out how something that seems inconsequential can have great ramifications.

But there is a rest of the story to Marsh’s apostasy. He was under a great deal of personal and religious stress. As a senior church apostle, he was confronting rebellions from some of the church’s earliest leaders, including John Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery, William E. McLellin, John Boynton, Luke Johnson and Lyman Johnson. In fact, Marsh’s efforts to maintain a church led by Joseph Smith were rewarded with his appointment as “President pro tem of the Church in Zion,” writes Anderson.

Nevertheless, history records that by the end of 1838 Marsh was both an apostate and an enemy to the LDS Church and its prophet, Joseph Smith. Casting aside the “Milk and Strippings” story as more legend than fact, John Hamer, writing in the blog bycommonconsent, offers a reason for Marsh’s apostasy that seems to have more curd in it. Hamer casts Marsh as a church leader very concerned over the young faith’s embrace of “Gideon’s mythic defeat of the Midianites (Judges 7-8) where God required only 300 men to defeat 120,000,” Hamer writes. Hamer argues that Marsh’s concern over Mormons wanting Quixotic battles with far superior enemies that would be waged with God’s help “was no small thing. Rather, it was the big thing.”

Now, the second part of the “Milk and Strippings” fable is that Marsh, nearly 20 years later, returned to Utah a broken man, begged publicly for forgiveness, and was reinstated into the church by a forgiving Brigham Young. Again part of that’s true, but it’s much more complex.

As Hamer notes, Young offered this ungracious reply: “I presume that Brother Marsh will take no offen[s]e if I talk a little about him. We have manifested our feelings towards him, and we know his situation. With regard to this Church’s being reconciled to him, I can say that this Church and people were never dissatisfied with him; for when men and women apostatize and go from us, we have nothing to do with them. If they do that which is evil, they will suffer for it. Brother Marsh has suffered. ...

“He has told you that he is an old man. Do you think that I am an old man? I could prove to this congregation that I am young; for I could find more girls who would choose me for a husband than can any of the young men. Brother Thomas considers himself very aged and infirm, and you can see that he is, brethren and sisters. What is the cause of it? He left the Gospel of salvation. What do you think the difference is between his age and mine? One year and seven months to a day; and he is one year, seven months, and fourteen days older than brother Heber C. Kimball. ‘Mormonism’ keeps men and women young and handsome; and when they are full of the Spirit of God, there are none of them but what will have a glow upon their countenances; and that is what makes you and me young; for the Spirit of God is with us and within us. When Brother Thomas thought of returning to the Church, the plurality of wives troubled him a good deal. Look at him. Do you think it need to? I do not; for I doubt whether he could get one wife. Why it should have troubled an infirm old man like him is not for me to say.”

Hamer describes Young as “uncharitable” in his remarks. Perhaps that’s true, but there’s more context to this historical tale, as Van Wagoner and Walker note in their Sunstone article. Prior to the reunion and speeches at the Bowery, Marsh had sent Young what he claimed was a revelation from God. It read in part, as the Sunstone piece records, “Behold I say unto thee Brigham Young! Where is the servant of the Lord, Thomas Marsh, Chief of the 12 to whom the Lord gave the keys of the Kingdom? from whom they have not been taken, who was driven out from among you because of the iniquity of his brethren who hunted for his blood but did not obtain it because his life was hid with Christ in god, because he had made the Lord, who was the God of David, his habitation …”

The letter from Marsh to Young also claimed that God wanted Young, as well as himself, to be part of a “Supreme Council” in which “they shale obtain the word of the Lord through the mouth of Thomas ...”

Brigham Young did not suffer those whom he considered fools easily. Reading the letter, one imagines emotions including contempt, pity and compassion. History does record that he sent for Thomas B. Marsh, and allowed the “prodigal apostle” a place in the church he once abandoned. Young’s tendency to be blunt, one which often extended to cruelty, was also on display on the day the former apostle Marsh addressed the Utah saints. As for Marsh, after spending time in Springville and Spanish Fork, he eventually moved to Ogden. As Van Wagoner and Walker note, he sometimes wrote Brigham Young, requesting clothes. He died in Ogden in 1867, and is buried in the city cemetery.

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published at StandardBlogs

More than 100 years ago, Smoot Senate hearings titillated the public

Utah Sen. Reed Smoot, R-Utah, was an apostle and U.S. senator. Too bad that too few of us recall the fierce, almost four-year U.S. Senate battle that resulted before Smoot was fully accepted as a senator. He served until 1933.

The Monica Lewinsky testimony had nothing on the Smoot hearings. The Mormon Church, with its alleged rampant secret polygamy, anti-government rhetoric, “lecherous” old leaders in white beards, captured the attention of a gossipy nation and crusading publicity-seeking pols. As Mormon historian Michael Harold Paulos points out in several essays, hundreds of political cartoons were published — most on the front page — during the tenure of the Smoot hearings. The then-anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune published more than 300 Smoot-related cartoons. Church President Joseph F. Smith, future president Heber J. Grant, and pols of that era, including U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, found themselves caricatured as part of the hearings’ commentary — most often with savage wit.

No topics were off limits. Secret LDS temple ceremonies were discussed on Capitol Hill. The Washington Times, on Dec. 14, 1904, published on its front page a photo of a man wearing Mormon garments and temple garb. 

To provide an example of the barbed hearings, here’s an excerpt of testimony between LDS Prophet Joseph F. Smith, who admitted to fathering children with his wives after the first LDS Manifesto on polygamy, from Paulos’ The Journal of Mormon History article, “Under the Gun at the Smoot Hearings: Joseph F. Smith’s Testimony”:

(Senate questioner) “Do you consider it an abandonment of your family to maintain relations with your wives except that of occupying their beds?”

(President Smith) “I do not wish to be impertinent, but I should like the gentleman to ask any woman, who is a wife, that question.”

The prophet had some wit, as that rejoinder shows. He also drew praise for candor, although it was a selective candor. As Paulos points out, Smith frequently obfuscated and avoided issues. He was a turn-of-the-century Alan Greenspan, often confusing senators. Smith shocked many Utahns when he stated under oath: “I have never pretended to nor do I profess to have received revelations.” That untrue statement may be a result of Smith’s long tenure in the LDS Church, fraught with longstanding distrust of federal authority.

Cartoons included references to Sisyphus pushing Mormonism up a hill, a tattooed Smoot covered with LDS liabilities on his body, and a Tribune cartoon that mocked Smith for his lack of candor on revelation. As Paulos explains, the era was a golden time of political cartooning, with most cartoons on page 1A, rather than the editorial pages. Readers can see several of the cartoons in the December 2006 Sunstone magazine, “Political Cartooning and the Reed Smoot Hearings,” authored by Paulos.

It seemed unlikely for a long while that Smoot would be accepted as a senator, but history records that after the long hearings, he passed Senate muster fairly easily. He owed that win primarily to President Roosevelt, who bucked popular sentiment and backed Smoot, whom the president genuinely liked. 

Another factor helping Smoot was that the original charges against him being a senator were lodged by anti-Mormons in Utah, who added one significant false charge — that Smoot was a polygamist. He was not; nor was he a strict LDS theologian. In fact, Smoot was chosen as an apostle and future senator due to his lack of interest in theology compared to politics and public service. In his speech to the U.S. Senate, which Paulos includes in an essay, Smoot is persuasive in both defending Mormonism and promising to separate his politics from his religion. Paulos suggests that current LDS politicians who seek political office should emulate Smoot’s frankness. That seems to be a critique of Mitt Romney’s “religion in the public arena” speech in 2008, one that failed to sway many voters wary of Mormonism.

Also read The seating of Reed Smoot

In 1904, LDS President Smith issued a second Manifesto against polygamy. It eventually led to the excommunications of apostles John W. Taylor and Matthias Cowley, who flaunted their polygamous lifestyles. Paulos opines that the Smoot hearings and the Second Manifesto were beginning steps toward the modernization and eventual secular power of today’s LDS Church.

The Smoot hearings cartoons are priceless, provocative mementos of LDS history. Paulos, and colleague Ken Cannon, have privately published a professionally bound, 90-page book on the Smoot hearings. One hundred copies were printed and the small publication was presented at a past Mormon History Association gathering. Many libraries have copies of the publication.

-- Doug Gibson

This article was previously published at StandardBlogs.