Prior to 1890, when President Woodruff met with Republican leaders in San Francisco, the majority of Mormons supported the Democratic party on national issues. But in the mid-1880s, during President Grover Cleveland’s Democratic administration, George Q. Cannon warned in a letter to Cleveland’s emissary George L. Miller that the harshness with which his administration was dealing with the Mormons would “act disastrously upon the future prospects of the party.” Cannon stressed that Mormons were, “with very few exceptions, Democrats,” and that they held the political power in Utah, Idaho, and Arizona and were “not to be despised in Nevada and Colorado.” Reminding officials that Mormons numbered nearly 250,000, Cannon hoped that the Democrats would “appreciate their value” and seek their favor rather than oppress them (Lyman 1981, 60-61).
Mormon hope for Democratic support of Utah statehood gradually waned. After Cleveland signed on 27 February 1889 the omnibus bill squelching Utah’s statehood bid, Utah congressman John T. Caine lamented the action in a letter to George L. Miller. “I believe the Democratic party by its cowardice on the Mormon question through its refusal to admit Utah with an anti-polygamy constitution has lost the control of four states which the Mormon people could have given it, viz. Utah, Idaho, Arizona, and Wyoming.” The Mormons “have always been true to the Democratic party,” Caine added, “but the party when in power did not appreciate them and failed to take advantage of the strength which they could have given it” (ibid., 223-24).
Early in 1890 President Woodruff sent his counselor George Q. Cannon to Washington, D.C., to try again to obtain Democratic support for Utah statehood. The Democrats provided no aid. Cannon, who during his congressional service had sat on the Democratic side of the floor, switched his allegiance to the Republican party. Cannon’s son Frank, an ardent Republican, succeeded in mid-May 1890 in obtaining Republican support for opposing passage of the Cullom-Strubble Bill. The elder Cannon was optimistic that the “Republican party are becoming more favorably impressed with regard to the importance of securing Mormon votes and influence” (Abraham H. Cannon Diary, 10 July 1890). A shrewd politician, Cannon immediately began to lobby other church leaders to support the Republicans. His son Abraham noted in his 31 July 1890 diary, “The Democrats when they had the power to do us good were afraid, and betrayed us so that now we feel as though the Republican party should be tried to see if they will be fair to us.”
When Presidents Woodruff and Cannon returned from California in September 1890 with word of support from Republican leaders, church allegiance soon shifted towards that party. Two days before the 10 June 1891 dissolution of the Mormon-controlled People’s Party, Apostle Abraham H. Cannon worried in his journal about the “danger of our people all [giving their allegiance to the] Democrats.… It is felt that efforts should be made to instruct our people in Republicanism and thus win them to that party.”
Cannon also recorded the revealing comment made by his colleague in the First Presidency Joseph F. Smith that “We have received the strongest admonition from our Republican friends that we must not allow this Territory to go strongly Democratic.” Announcing that church leaders had “favored John Henry [Smith]’s going on the stump so as to convince the people that a man could be a Republican and still be a saint,”1 second counselor Joseph F. Smith admonished: “I wish more of the Apostles belonged to this party and would sign the rolls. The Republicans will stand by their friends, which the Democrats have not done and I believe they will yet grant us amnesty if we encourage them to believe this may become a Republican state. I know many prominent men of this party who are today our friends and who are working in our interests, but I do not know a single Democrat who is helping us. Such men as Blaine, Clarkson, Stanford, and Estee are deeply interested in our affairs and desire to do us good” (ibid., 9 July 1891).2
Church leaders publicly urged the Saints to join the political party of their choice. However, to counterbalance Democratic strength in the territory, authorities decided that “men in high authority who believed in Republican principles should go out among the people, but that those in high authority who could not endorse the principles of Republicanism should remain silent” (ibid., 15 June 1891).3
The Republican party responded to this newfound Mormon allegiance by pressing for the amnesty of polygamist Saints convicted under the Edmunds and Edmunds-Tucker acts. During the summer of 1891 a petition drafted by Joseph F. Smith and his cousin John Henry Smith was sent to U.S. Republican president Benjamin Harrison. Signed by the First Presidency and ten members of the Quorum of the Twelve, the paper explained the origin of the Manifesto and said that the Mormon people had “in the most solemn manner accepted [it] as the future rule of their lives.… As shepherds of a patient and suffering people,” the petition concluded, “we ask amnesty for them and pledge our faith and honor for their future” (Clark 1965-75, 3:229-31).
An amnesty proclamation was issued on 4 January 1893. After citing the various anti-bigamy laws, the report of the Utah Commission, and the previous pardon given to some individuals guilty of illegal cohabitation, President Harrison granted a full amnesty and pardon to all persons “liable to the penalties of said act by reason of unlawful cohabitation under the color of polygamous or plural marriage, who have, since November 1, 1890, abstained from such unlawful cohabitation.” He specified, however, that the amnesty was based on the condition that in the future those who had been pardoned must obey the law or be “vigorously prosecuted” (Proceedings 1:19).
The Utah Commission continued the liberalizing trend on 19 July by ruling that reformed polygamists would again be allowed to vote. Shortly thereafter the escheated church property was returned. President Grover Cleveland, elected to a second term, eventually broadened the amnesty proclamation of Benjamin Harrison. However, church officials soon demonstrated that they held the practice of plural marriage in greater esteem than they did their pledge to the government. With the exception of Lorenzo Snow, who cohabited only with his youngest wife, not a single apostle or member of the First Presidency discontinued connubial relationships with plural wives.
Apostle Abraham H. Cannon recorded several comments in his diary from a 1 April 1892 discussion of the proposed amnesty petition. According to Cannon, Lorenzo Snow stated that “when the Manifesto was issued we had no idea that it was to effect our cohabitation with our wives, but Pres. Woodruff and his brethren who were on the witness stand before the Master in Chancery, were forced to go further in their testimony than we anticipated, or we would have been placed in a worse position than we were before the Manifesto was issued.” Apostle Moses Thatcher added, “I have yet to meet the first man among all the eminent men with whom I have conversed upon our question who feels that our past family relations should be disrupted.”
Heber J. Grant, later to become president of the church, clearly described the situation, as again noted in Cannon’s 1 April 1892 diary entry. “I remember Pres. Woodruff saying that the Manifesto would never apply to our living with our wives, and he would see them damned and in hell before he would agree to cease living with his wives or advise any other person to do so.” Grant personally felt “that if we had taken the manly stand and had said we will continue to live with and honor our present wives but will cease marrying in the future, we would have fared better; but now I cannot see any chance of our ever being permitted to live with our wives in freedom again.”
Though the 1891 petition for amnesty did not specifically pledge conformity to the law, the grants of amnesty from Presidents Harrison and Cleveland clearly assumed such.4 Still, eleven General Authorities, including Heber J. Grant, fathered seventy-six children by twenty-seven plural wives during the years 1890-1905 (Cannon 1978, 31). Though Grant had children by only one wife after 1890, he pled guilty to a charge of unlawful cohabitation in 1899 and was fined $100 (Salt Lake Tribune, 9 Sept. 1899). In addition he later reportedly sought permission from President Joseph F. Smith to marry Fanny Woolley as a post-Manifesto plural wife.5 Smith refused Grant’s request. Thus the future church president became one of the few members of the hierarchy who neither took a post-Manifesto plural wife nor sealed others in plural marriages.6
Few authorized plural marriages occurred during the first three years after the Manifesto.7 Many church members who continued to believe that plural marriage was essential to their exaltation approached President Woodruff requesting that exceptions be made in their cases. Most petitioners were simply told that the First Presidency could do nothing for them at present. But polygamy was authorized for those who were willing to travel to Mexico. Authorization was usually given by George Q. Cannon, who had initially proposed that plural marriages continue to be performed in Mexico. Woodruff, now nearing ninety, evidently preferred a system of “plausible deniability” wherein he allowed his younger counselors to direct the new polygamy so that as church president he could not be directly linked to the activities.8
Cannon and Joseph F. Smith sent couples wishing to be married to Mexican church leaders Alexander F. MacDonald or Apostle George Teasdale. In 1895 the First Presidency called Anthony W. Ivins to replace Teasdale as marriage officiator and to serve as the first stake president in Colonia Juarez. Though a monogamist himself, Ivins was authorized during June 1897 meetings with the First Presidency to perform plural marriage sealings. A form letter was discussed which, when presented to Ivins by a couple, would indicate First Presidency approval to seal the marriage. Later, relating that meeting to a son, Ivins explained that George Q. Cannon had taken him aside and said, “Now Brother Ivins, if you have occasion to meet Porfio Diaz, President of Mexico, we want you to tell him that we are NOT practicing polygamy in Mexico” (H. G. Ivins, 5).9
In addition, George Q. Cannon also gave Matthias Cowley permission to marry couples polygamously. Cowley’s sealings usually took place in the United States. “I was never instructed to go to a foreign land to perform those marriages,” Cowley later reported: “President Cannon told me to do these things or I would never have done it” (Minutes of the Quorum of the Twelve, 10 May 1911). After Cannon’s death, Joseph F. Smith also sent couples to Cowley (Quinn 1985, 90-91). The total number of church-approved plural marriages between 1890 and 1904 numbered at least two hundred and fifty, but the annual number was apparently never greater than the thirty-three performed in 1903 (Cannon 1983, 29).
A definite increase in plural marriages occurred after Utah statehood was granted in 1896. Mormon leaders had wanted to convince the government that the church was giving up polygamy. But once statehood was attained they hoped plural marriage could again be openly practiced under lenient or amended state laws. Apostle John Henry Smith discussed this in a 3 April 1888 letter to his cousin, Joseph F. Smith. “It looks to me,” he wrote two years before the Manifesto, “as if the only chance on that score [statehood] is to give the whole business away [plural marriage], renouncing our faith save for five years and then taking it up again when once inside the great government fold.” But the plans of church leaders were anticipated and waylaid. The Utah constitution, drafted in 1895, prohibited polygamy “forever,” nomenclature taken from the Utah Enabling Act passed by Congress. The state drafting committee also felt it necessary to insert an amending clause which retained in force after statehood the 1892 territorial anti-polygamy law.
Though the number of plural marriages sanctioned after statehood was small compared to pre-1890 practices, the conflict between church leaders’ endorsement of new polygamy and their anti-polygamy public assurances began to cause increased difficulties. The discrepancy led Utah lawmakers in 1898 to include a statute in the criminal code outlawing unlawful cohabitation. More disturbing still to church leaders was a new attack from the press, which accused the church of bad faith in not keeping its pledges.
Wilford Woodruff died on 2 September 1898. His successor, Lorenzo Snow, sent out messages on new polygamy that for many Mormons were nearly as confusing as Woodruff’s private and public utterances had been. Predictably, the result was chaotic division within the Quorum of the Twelve and among the church generally. Before performing an October 1898 plural marriage for Joseph Morrell, Apostle Matthias Cowley asked Snow’s permission, and later reported that the church president “simply told me that he would not interfere with Brother Woodruff’s and Cannon’s work” (Minutes of the Quorum of the Twelve, 10 May 1911). Yet Snow sent Apostle John Henry Smith to Mexico in 1901 to tell A. F. MacDonald that “if he was sealing plural wives to men his standing in the Church was in danger” (John Henry Smith Diary, 27 May 1901). Smith delivered the message, threatening MacDonald with excommunication if he did not stop the practice. But MacDonald, like Anthony W. Ivins and Matthias Cowley, was receiving different instructions from Presidents Cannon and Smith. Joseph F. Smith, through a visiting apostle, sent word to MacDonald in September advising him to ignore Snow’s threats and continue to seal plural marriages, which he did.
President Snow seemed to be moving slowly in the direction of abandoning polygamy. “The Church has positively abandoned the practice of polygamy … in this and every other state,” he explained in an 8 January 1900 Deseret News editorial. “No one has any authority whatever,” he added, “to form a plural marriage or enter into such relation.” But several apostles, including Marriner W. Merrill and George Teasdale, “stood firmly in favor of polygamy” when the issue was discussed in a meeting of the apostles two days later (John Henry Smith Diary, 10 Jan. 1900).10
Dissension in the ranks of the hierarchy over new polygamy was complicated when a 1900 congressional investigation, instigated to prevent Elder B. H. Roberts from taking his House seat, produced evidence that Roberts and other church leaders had ignored their pledges to the government. Newspapers attacked the Mormons for going back on their word. These accusations disturbed eighty-six-year-old Lorenzo Snow. To clarify his position to other church leaders he announced on 1 January 1900 that any man living with his plural wives was in violation of the law.
Later that month, during a meeting with the Quorum of the Twelve, Snow expressed fears that plural marriages were being sanctioned in the church despite his opposition. “Without reference to anyone present,” an account of the meeting reported, he “said that there were brethren who still seemed to have the idea that it was possible under his administration to obtain a plural wife and have her sealed to him. He authorized and requested the brethren present to correct this impression wherever they find it. He said emphatically that it could not be done.” George Q. Cannon, the leader most responsible for “back-handed” polygamy, as Reed Smoot’s secretary Carl Badger would later call it, moved that Snow’s pronouncement be “seconded as the mind and will of the Lord” (ibid., 11 Jan. 1900).
One year later Snow reaffirmed his anti-polygamy sentiments by telling Apostle Brigham Young, Jr.: “God has removed this privilege from the people, and until he restores it, I shall not consent to any man taking a plural wife.… There is no such thing as men taking plural wives and keeping it secret.… It cannot be done. Has any one of the Apostles a right to seal plural wives to men by reason of former concessions made to them by the Presidency? No, sir, such right must come from me and no man shall be authorized by me to break the law of the land” (Brigham Young, Jr. Journal, 13 March 1901).11 Mormons who believed that no plural marriages had been authorized by church leaders after the Manifesto found support in the statements of President Snow. But those who were aware of previous official doubletalk viewed Snow’s rhetoric as more of the same: a necessity in protecting their domestic life.
Though the marriage record of Anthony Ivins in the Utah State Historical Society Library shows a decrease of marriages performed during Snow’s administration, Apostles Matthias F. Cowley, John W. Taylor, Brigham Young, Jr., George Teasdale, Abraham O. Woodruff, Marriner W. Merrill, John Henry Smith, Anthon H. Lund, and perhaps even George Q. Cannon and Joseph F. Smith were involved in sealing plural marriages not only in Mexico but also in Canada and the United States during this period.12
Numerous changes shook Mormonism during 1901. George Q. Cannon died in April. Six months later, on 10 October, Lorenzo Snow died. Meanwhile church leaders unsuccessfully attempted to nullify the unlawful cohabitation section of the Utah criminal code. A measure drafted by prominent Utah County Mormon, Abel John Evans, passed both state houses but was eventually vetoed by Governor Heber M. Wells, one of the thirty-seven children of First Presidency counselor Daniel H. Wells. “I have every reason to believe,” Governor Wells warned, “its enactment would be a signal for a general demand upon the National Congress for a constitutional amendment directed solely against certain conditions here; a demand which under the circumstances would assuredly be complied with” (Proceedings 1:11).
Joseph F. Smith, who in 1906 would plead guilty to violating the Utah state anti-polygamy law, became sixth president of the church on 17 October 1901. Smith had not only been aware of authorized post-Manifesto marriages—as evidenced by his 1890 advice to Byron Harvey Allred, Sr., and his 11 April 1911 telegram to Reed Smoot13—but had personally performed at least one such marriage prior to becoming church president. Smith was strongly critical of the church’s polygamy restrictions. “I have no sympathy whatever,” he wrote to Anthony W. Ivins on 6 February 1900, “with the prevailing feeling which seems to be leading some to the setting of stakes and fixing of meets and bounds to the purposes and policies of providence in such a way as to establish almost unsurmountable difficulties which may rise up to vex them and others in the future.” In August 1900, Smith and Elder Seymour B. Young were at Colonia Diaz during the sealing of Brigham Young Academy president Benjamin Cluff, Jr., to a plural wife, Florence Reynolds. Cluff had previously appealed unsuccessfully to Anthony W. Ivins to marry him and Reynolds without First Presidency approval. He later told a daughter that “Brother Joseph F. Smith told me that I could marry Aunt Florence” (Ingram). Another report described the marriage: “It was very dark and brother Clawson could not see who performed the ceremony. The voice, however, sounded exactly like President Smith’s” (LeBaron 1981, 39-40).
The tight restrictions Lorenzo Snow had placed on new polygamy were greatly relaxed during the first three years of Joseph F. Smith’s administration. From 1902 to April 1904 at least sixty-three plural marriages were sealed throughout the church. Anthony W. Ivins performed twenty-nine of these (Cannon 1983, 29). In a 7 March 1911 letter to his son, Ivins defended his role in post-Manifesto marriages, “It was not an easy matter to adjust conditions which had existed for nearly 40 years to the new order of things. Family ties had been established, covenants of the most sacred character were entered into, and it was thought that in exceptional cases, where such conditions existed, and people were in Mexico, marriages might be solemnized.” He then added an important postscript: “You may depend upon it. I have never performed a marriage ceremony without proper authority.” Further evidence that Ivins was acting under authority from Salt Lake City was his 1932 letter to a woman who had been excommunicated for becoming a plural wife after 1904. “I am speaking thus plainly,” Ivins wrote, “in order that you may know the truth.… The difference between these people [those advocating polygamy after 1904] and myself and others is that we acted with authority from the Church” (H. G. Ivins, 6-7).
That this “authority” included not only George Q. Cannon but also Joseph F. Smith is documented in the journal of Orson Pratt Brown, a bishop in the Mexican colonies. Brown related that during a visit to Salt Lake City he took the marriage records of his father-in-law, Alexander F. MacDonald, who had performed post-Manifesto marriages in Mexico, to President Smith. After thumbing through the book, Smith said to Brown, “all of this work that Brother MacDonald performed was duly authorized by me.” He then gave instructions for Brown to keep the record in Mexico so that federal marshals could not recover the document (Brown Journal, 39-40). In addition to Bishop Brown’s account, Joseph F. Smith’s personal papers in the LDS Archives include numerous signed forms similar to those used by George Q. Cannon to authorize Ivins and others to perform plural marriages.
Within a few months after Joseph F. Smith took office, the fact that polygamy continued began to cause new problems for the church. As early as March 1902 congressional efforts were afoot to pass a constitutional amendment forbidding polygamy and polygamous cohabitation in the United States. Church leaders feared this move and sent a circular letter to stake presidents throughout the church requesting statistical information to support their position that the number of polygamous Saints was decreasing.14 The First Presidency also sent Apostle John Henry Smith and Ben E. Rich to lobby against the proposed amendment. They were encouraged by President Theodore Roosevelt, who told them he thought “the proposed constitutional amendment should not go through” (Pusey 1982, 187). Other Republican figures, counting on future political support in Utah, also provided assurances that the amendment would not pass.
Meanwhile President Smith continued the familiar pattern, established in Nauvoo, of publicly denying what was being privately practiced. Thus during a First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve meeting composed predominantly of men who had either married post-Manifesto wives or sealed others in such relationships, Smith could say that no new plural marriages “were taking place to his knowledge in the church, either in the U.S. or any other country.” Furthermore, he explained, “it is thoroughly understood and has been for years that no one is authorized to perform any such marriages” (Brigham Young, Jr. Diary, 5 June 1902). During a 19 November 1903 meeting of the Quorum of the Twelve, he claimed “he had not given his consent to anyone to solemnize plural marriages” and “did not know of any such cases” (JH, 19 Nov. 1903). “Does the Mormon Church solemnize or permit plural marriages?” the 3 December 1903 Salt Lake Tribune asked Smith. “Certainly not,” he replied. “The church does not perform or sanction, or authorize, marriage in any form that is contrary to the laws of the land. The assertion that prominent Mormons practice polygamy is evidently done to mislead the public.”
Despite Smith’s reassurances that the church did not officially support new plural marriages, monogamist apostle Reed Smoot’s 1902 announcement of his candidacy for the U.S. Senate provided a convenient focus for anti-polygamy sentiment. The Salt Lake Ministerial Association objected that an apostle in Congress would violate the principle of separation of church and state. Despite the uproar, Smoot won the nomination and headed east. By the time he reached Washington, however, a national campaign challenging his right to be seated had been mounted against him. Charged with being the front-man for the Mormon hierarchy which “controlled Utah’s elections and economy” and was “secretly continuing to preach and permit plural marriages,” Smoot faced an uphill struggle to be confirmed. Though Smoot was allowed to take his seat pending results of the investigation, the matter was not resolved for nearly thirty months.
The more than three thousand pages of testimony from witnesses, including President Joseph F. Smith and several apostles, placed the church in an extremely bad light. Senator-elect Smoot summarized the Mormon position of acute embarrassment in a 22 March 1904 letter: “[W]e have not as a people, at all times, lived strictly to our agreements with the Government, and this lack of sincerity on our part goes farther to condemn us in the eyes of the public men of the nation than the mere fact of a few new polygamy cases, or a polygamist before the manifesto living in the state of unlawful cohabitation” (Smoot to Jesse M. Smith).
1. The First Presidency had organized a committee to promote Republicanism in the territory. John Henry Smith was called on a personal mission to engage in this activity, but Democrat apostle Moses Thatcher opposed to Smith’s activities. Defending his position, Smith announced he was “advancing the work of the Lord” by disposing “of the theory that this Territory belonged to the Democrats by divine right” (Abraham H. Cannon Journal, 9 July 1891).
2. For background on the People’s Party, see Wilford Woodruff/George Q. Cannon 23 June 1891 interview in the Salt Lake Times, also in Clark 1965-75, 3:211-17.
3. Democrats Moses Thatcher, B. H. Roberts, and Charles Penrose ignored this advice and were eventually censored for their Democratic campaigning. Political differences of opinion in 1896 resulted in Roberts’s brief disfellowship and Thatcher’s expulsion from the Quorum of the Twelve (see Van Wagoner and Walker 1980, 243-44, 368-70).
The Republican leanings of the First Presidency caused them difficulty in 1892. Their powerful secretary, George F. Gibbs, had written a letter which influenced the outcome of the 1891 Logan municipal elections. Gibbs, in the name of the First Presidency, had been “effective in turning many Democrats from their party to the Republican fold.” Presidents Woodruff and Joseph F. Smith later denied authorizing Gibbs to use their names. “If we have any desire in this matter,” they responded in the 25 March 1892 Deseret News Weekly, “it is that the people of this territory shall study well the principles of both the great national parties, and then choose which they will join, freely, voluntarily and honestly, from personal conviction.… We have no disposition to direct in these matters, but proclaim that, as far as we are concerned, the members of this church are entirely and perfectly free in all political affairs.”
4. See Proclamation no. 42, at 27 U.S. stat. 1058 (4 Jan. 1893), and Proclamation no. 14, at 28 U.S. stat. 1257 (25 Sept. 1894), in Jorgensen and Hardy 1980, 8. For full details on the steps leading to amnesty, see G. Larson 1971, 291-92.
5. See Minutes of the Quorum of the Twelve, 10 May 1911; also Heber J. Grant to Heber Bennion, 2 May 1929, Grant Letterbooks.
6. President Wilford Woodruff, John W. Taylor, Brigham Young, Jr., Matthias F. Cowley, George Teasdale, Marriner W. Merrill, Abraham H. Cannon, and Abraham O. Woodruff were post-Manifesto polygamists. In addition, George Q. Cannon, Joseph F. Smith, John Henry Smith, Anthon H. Lund, and Heber J. Grant either approved of or performed plural marriages after 1890. For details of these marriage ceremonies, see Quinn 1985; Cannon 1983; 27-41; and Jorgenson and Hardy 1980, 10-19. The Joseph Eckersley Journal, 2-6 Sept. 1903, implies that Apostle F. M. Lyman was the lone apostle who interpreted the Manifesto as banning new polygamy, and “he was not in harmony with the rest of the Apostles on that subject.”
7. Family Group Sheets of Byron Harvey Allred, Sr., Calvert Lorenzo Allred, and Anson Call document three such marriages (LDS Genealogical Archives).
8. Apostle Matthias F. Cowley related in 1911: “President Cannon told me he had the authority from President Woodruff and Brother Joseph F. Smith told me on two occasions that Brother Cannon had the authority and Brother Woodruff didn’t want to be known in it” (Minutes of the Quorum of the Twelve, 10 May 1911). Respecting his own position in performing post-Manifesto marriages, Cowley reported, “President Cannon told me to do these things … President Snow, did not, he simply told me he would not interfere with Brother Woodruff’s and Cannon’s work” (ibid.).
The influence of Woodruff’s counselors during his administration was made public during an 1895 statement by Apostle John W. Taylor. Abraham H. Cannon noted in his diary on 3 December 1895 that during a Davis (Utah) Stake conference, Taylor “made some remarks which were scarcely proper concerning the mental and physical condition of Pres. Woodruff who was unable, he said, to do the work of the Church without the help of his counselors, ‘As well might a baby be placed at the head of the Church as Pres. Woodruff without the aid of Presidents Cannon and Smith’.”
9. See also Stanley S. Ivins to Juanita Brooks, 25 Feb. 1955, copy in author’s possession.
10. Merrill went so far as to say: “I am aware of the feeling growing among the people that plural families are unpopular. They are growing less. They will never die out. This principle will never be taken from the earth.… There are some who think the Church is going back upon the principle I tell them this is not so” (Anthon H. Lund Journal, 9 Jan. 1900).
11. Referring to “former concessions made by the Presidency,” Carl A. Badger quoted Joseph F. Smith in his diary for 26 March 1904 as saying that “the Church did not authorize such things but that some of the brethren who hold the authority to do such things refuse to give up their power.”
12. The Canadian government, unlike the Mexican government, rigidly enforced its opposition to polygamy. For this reason plural marriage was never as visible in Canada as it was in Mexico.
13. B. Harvey Allred, Jr., noted that his 15 July 1903 plural marriage to Mary Evelyn Clark was approved by a “recommend” Joseph F. Smith had sent to Ivins: “This recommends Brother Byron Harvey Allred as a man worthy to live the United Order with the Saints in Old Mexico” (Allred 1968, 372). The telegram to Smoot is in the Smoot Collection.
14. The survey showed that in 1902 there were only 897 polygamous families, as compared with 2,451 in 1890 (Allen and Leonard 1976, 441). This survey was not conducted without bias, however. Stake presidents who gathered the data were forewarned that it was to the church’s advantage to minimize the number of polygamous families. In addition the survey only represented polygamous families in the United States. The hundreds, perhaps thousands, of plural families in Mexico and Canada were excluded by instructions that “in cases where heads of families have … gone for the purpose of residing beyond the confines of the republic … the polygamic relations, so far as the purpose of this inquiry is concerned, must be regarded as ended” (see First Presidency [Joseph F. Smith, John R. Winder, Anthon H. Lund] to St. George Stake president E. H. Snow, 21 March 1901).