In conversation with a non-Mormon shortly after the release of the 1933 statement from the First Presidency, J. Reuben Clark, Jr., explained that they had issued the public release because “some carnally-minded old birds are saying the Church is not in earnest about the matter, and were winking at the situation” (Quinn 1983, 184). The official 1933 pronouncement pacified mainstream Mormons and others who had long opposed polygamy. But it also unintentionally served as a catalyst for unifying the various factions of the Fundamentalist movement.
J. Reuben Clark’s assignment as chief enforcer of the church’s anti-polygamy efforts had previously been the assignment of Apostle James Talmage and before him Francis M. Lyman. Clark carried out his assignment vigorously, his previous experience in supervising the U.S. Justice Department’s World War I activities against suspected subversives serving him well in dealing with new polygamists. He favored a church-wide loyalty oath which he felt would smoke out Fundamentalists from within Mormon ranks. Scores of Mormons were consequently excommunicated because of their refusal to sign such statements.1
To strengthen the legal battery in the war against new polygamy, Utah lawmakers on 14 March 1935 passed an act “Making Unlawful Cohabitation a Felony, and Providing That All Persons Except the Defendant Must Testify in Proceedings Thereof.”2 Responding to this and other anti-polygamy actions of the day, Fundamentalist leader Joseph W. Musser, who had been planning an underground publication for years, initiated a monthly periodical in June 1935. Truth, devoted to fervent defense of plural marriage, contained numerous statements of prominent Mormons of the past advocating polygamy as essential to exaltation, an eternal law that would never be done away with.
To counteract the growing strength of Fundamentalists, Clark, in the late 1930s, began authorizing loyal Mormons to conduct surveillance on persons attending meetings in the Salt Lake City homes of known Fundamentalists. He urged the Salt Lake City library to exclude Fundamentalist literature and in 1940 asked the Salt Lake City postmaster to prohibit the mailing of Fundamentalist tracts. In March of 1940, during a meeting with Salt Lake County stake presidents, the prosecution of polygamists was discussed. One stake president noted that the district attorney “was a good Latter-day Saint and would prosecute the ‘new polyg’s’ criminally if it were deemed wise.” Clark ordered that such prosecution begin immediately (ibid., 185).
Church leaders also sought to suppress the rise of Fundamentalism through other avenues. During a 5 June 1939 meeting of Salt Lake City’s Pioneer Stake, stake president Paul C. Child reportedly instructed his bishops that all polygamists “are in very humble circumstances, being practically destitute, and if we help them we are helping to support plural families.” He instructed bishops to withhold church relief from such families (Truth 5 [Aug. 1939]: 59). A short time later the Presiding Bishopric’s office sent out a church-wide circular (Church Bulletin, No. 223) to all stake presidencies and ward bishoprics advising that children of polygamous parentage be denied baptismal rites until old enough to “repudiate the principle that gave them birth.”
Despite the opposition of church and law enforcement officials, or perhaps because of it, the Fundamentalist movement continued to spread. Much of this growth can be attributed to Joseph W. Musser’s editorial work on Truth. Son of a former assistant church historian, Musser had access to sensitive documents in the church archives. He charged that the Wilford Woodruff Manifesto was issued for political expediency only and filled the columns of Truth with incident after incident of authorized post-Manifesto plural marriage. Claiming that the church had been led astray in abandoning “God’s order of marriage,” he alleged that Fundamentalists held the authority for continuing plural marriage.
Truth was such an irritant to Mormon leaders that in 1944 efforts were undertaken to silence the publication and to jail major Fundamentalist leaders, including Musser. About 6:00 a.m., 7 March 1944, a Salt Lake City raid, coordinated by FBI agents, U.S. marshals, deputy sheriffs, and Salt Lake City policemen, netted forty-six suspected Fundamentalists. Without search warrants, law enforcement officials confiscated issues of Truth and additional documents they felt could be used as evidence against the individuals.
Fifteen of the defendants were booked for “unlawful cohabitation” and/or “conspiracy” to promote the practice of “unlawful cohabitation.” Thirty-four were indicted solely on the latter charge, which referred to sending Truth through the mail. The indictment alleged that the periodical was “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent and immoral in that sexual offenses against society, to-wit, plural marriages, were to be and were advocated and urged, thereby tending to deprave and corrupt the morals of those whose minds were and are open to such influences, and into whose hands said Truth might fall” (Salt Lake Tribune, 8 March 1944).
The First Presidency, consisting of Heber J. Grant, J. Reuben Clark, and David O. McKay, applauded the arrests. “Since the Manifesto by President Woodruff was adopted by the Church,” the three men noted in an official release appearing in the Salt Lake Tribune, 8 March, “the first presidency and other general authorities have repeatedly issued warnings against an apostate group that persisted in the practice of polygamous marriages.” “We commend and uphold the federal government,” the statement concluded, “in its efforts through the office of the United States district attorney and assisting agencies to bring before the bar of justice those who have violated the law.”3
Church leaders did not wish to be implicated directly in the “Boyden Crusade,” as the 1944 raid was called. But during the court hearing one witness testified that he had been given an ecclesiastical calling by David O. McKay to spy on suspected Fundamentalists and gather information for the prosecution. The church was unwillingly drawn farther into the case by a letter from fledgling apostle Mark E. Petersen to Murray Moler, the local United Press bureau manager, which was read into the court record. Petersen, former editor of the Deseret News, requested that Moler print “another statement or two setting forth the Church’s position” on polygamy, so that the recent arrests not be connected in the public mind with the Mormon Church. Petersen wanted it known that “1. All the cultists are not former members of the Church. Some have been recruited from various protestant faiths. 2. All cultists who have held membership in the L.D.S. Church have been excommunicated by the Church, some of them, as Joseph Musser, the ring-leader, having been excommunicated many years ago. 3. The Church has actively assisted federal and state authorities in obtaining evidence against the cultists and helping to prosecute them, under the law. 4. Among witnesses for the prosecution are men who have been appointed by the Church to search out the cultists, turning over such information as they gather to the prosecution for their use; these men have also been appointed by the Church to do all they can to fight the spread of polygamy. 5. The Church has opposed the practice and teaching of plural marriage since the adoption of a Manifesto in an official conference of the Church held in Salt Lake City, October 6, 1890, and has excommunicated members since that date who have either taught or practiced it. 6. The cultists use the name fundamentalists which is regarded by the Church as a misnomer. They are not fundamentalists in the sense of holding to the fundamental doctrines of the Church, for the fundamental doctrines of the Church are now opposed to polygamy. Use of this name has caused confusion in the public mind and has tended to give the impression (which is what the cultists sought) that they are old line Mormons, which they are not.”
The conspiracy charges brought against the individual Fundamentalists were quickly quashed, but violations of the Mann Act (husbands crossed state borders with plural wives) and charges of kidnapping (three individuals had transported a pregnant plural wife across state lines to give the baby benefit of legitimate birth) were upheld, resulting in the imprisonment of fifteen men.
Over the protest of Brigham E. Roberts, who had led the prosecuting efforts against the Fundamentalists, the state board of pardons decided to parole the fifteen men, each of whom had served a term of seven months, so that they could be home for Christmas. But there were stiff conditions to be met before and during parole. The pardoned polygamists were expected to live “only with their legal wives, in homes separate from those occupied by their plural spouses and the children.” They had to “make a sincere effort to support the other women and the scores of minor children.” The official pardon also stipulated that the former polygamists attend no “meetings espousing polygamy.”
Joseph W. Musser, Rulon C. Allred, Albert E. Barlow, Edmund F. Barlow, Ianthus W. Barlow, John Y. Barlow, Oswald Brainich, Heber K. Cleveland, David B. Darger, Joseph Lyman Jessop, and Alma A. Timpson were freed 15 December 1944. Arnold Boss, Morris Q. Kunz, Louis Alma Kelsch, and Charles F. Zitting were not paroled until later because they refused to sign the pledge, an action which made them heroes among independent Fundamentalists.
District Attorney Roberts questioned the wisdom of releasing the men before they had served the full five years of their sentences. In a letter to the board of pardons he called attention to recent articles in Truth which “eulogized the prisoners as martyrs and commended the inmates for ‘upholding the practice of plural marriage.’ “He charged that the “cultists” still advocated polygamy in their meetings and insisted the only way the practice could be “rubbed out” was to keep the ringleaders in prison. “I question the good faith of their pledges,” he added. “These people have practiced polygamy for years knowing it was against the law. However, now for their own convenience and advantage, they are willing to make this promise. No security is given that the promise will be kept.” Roberts pointed out that “these people will return to their families and cult, and it will again be necessary for the law enforcement agencies to build a case against them. That will take a great deal of time and money” (Salt Lake Tribune, 27 Nov. 1945).
Although Roberts’s prediction proved to be prophetic, the effort and expense of building another case against polygamists was the burden not of Utah but of Arizona. Short Creek, Arizona, was founded in 1913 by non-polygamist J. M. Lauritzen on the Arizona-Utah border. The first polygamists in the area, Price W. Johnson, Edner Allred, and Carling Spencer, recognized the strategic location of the townsite for polygamists on the run. Situated in the part of Mohave County known as the “Arizona strip,” a geographical area cut off from the rest of the state by the Grand Canyon, this community twenty-eight miles south of Hurricane, Utah, was situated four hundred miles from the Mohave County seat of Kingman, Arizona.
In 1935 Short Creek was a small town of twenty houses plus a combination store and gas station, with a post office serving patrons on alternate days. Several polygamist Mormon families had moved into the area and joined with other plural families in a cooperative organization designed to build up the community as “the first city of the Millennium.” This concerned some of the old, non-polygamist Mormon settlers, who reported the action to church officials. Ex-senator Reed Smoot, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, was sent to Hurricane at the request of Zion Park stake president Claude Hirschi. Twenty-one members of the Short Creek Branch were excommunicated for refusal to sign the following pledge: “I, the undersigned member of Short Creek Branch of the Rockville Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, declare and affirm that I[,] without any mental reservation whatsoever, support the presidency of the church, and that I repudiate any intimation that any of the Presidency or Apostles of the Church are living a double life, and that I repudiate those who are falsely accusing them, and that I denounce the practice and advocacy of plural marriage as being out of harmony with the declared principles of the Church at the present time.”
Excommunication was as far as Mormon church leaders could go in curtailing polygamy in Short Creek, but they also encouraged legal action against the offenders. Mohave County officials noticed that county welfare records often showed several Short Creek women married to the same man. In September 1935, County Attorney Elmo Bollinger and the county sheriff visited Short Creek to investigate the situation. They arrested Price W. Johnson and his cousin Carling Spencer. Brought before Short Creek justice of the peace J. M. Lauritzen, the two were released for lack of evidence. Later in the day, after obtaining more conclusive information, the officers sought to arrest the two again. But they, along with Spencer’s plural wife Sylvia, had taken refuge in a nearby cave where they remained for seven days. On 28 September they surrendered in Kingman on “open and notorious cohabitation” charges. Commenting on the arrests, Bollinger reported that “officials of the regular (Mormon) Church were assisting to bring about the arrest and conviction of polygamists” (Truth, 1 [1 Oct. 1935]: 50).4
Short Creekers could not understand why they were not left alone. “Why come up four hundred miles to that desert ‘Arizona strip’ to pounce upon a peaceful, hard-working, struggling, christian community, suspected only of having more married women than men?” Joseph Musser editorialized in the 1 October 1935 Truth. “Surely the great State of Arizona—great in its western atmosphere and broad tolerance—is not so free from moral delinquencies as to justify its officials leaving the more populous sections of the State to train their legal artillery on this little community” to “break up homes and fasten unreasonable hardships upon men and women—with their children—whose only offense, if offense it be, is to make sexual virtue a crowning point in their lives.”
Mohave County officials did not see the situation that way. The three defendants were found guilty of the charges in December 1935 and given an eighteen-to-twenty-four-month prison sentence. Sylvia Spencer’s sentence was suspended because of her advanced pregnancy, but her husband and Price Johnson, after spending one month in the county jail at Kingman, were sent to the Arizona State Penitentiary at Florence. Model prisoners, they were made trustees after their third day of imprisonment and spent the duration of their eleven months’ incarceration working in the prison garden, tannery, and dairy. Returning home to Short Creek after their 8 November 1936 release, Spencer and Johnson, like the more than 1,300 Mormon men and women who had been “prisoners for conscience sake” during the 1880s, were hailed as folk heroes.
Short Creek’s population continued to grow. By the early 1950s the community numbered close to four hundred citizens, nearly all of whom were polygamists. Polygamy-related trouble in the area surfaced again when Utah cattlemen with grazing rights in the Short Creek area began to grumble that their grazing fees were used to support the education of polygamous children. The Arizona state legislature secretly appropriated $10,000 to employ the Burns Detective Agency of Los Angeles to probe Short Creek polygamy. Rumor had it that church leaders in Salt Lake City had made a standing offer of $100,000 to Arizona officials if the state would eradicate the Short Creek colony. Mormon bishops in Phoenix and Mesa began quiet surveys of their congregations to determine which homes could accommodate additional children.
Short Creekers were forewarned of the impending raid. Advance notice of the action published in Salt Lake City newspapers was telephoned to Short Creek. At 4:00 a.m., Sunday morning, 26 July 1953, with the moon in full eclipse, more than one hundred heavily armed law enforcement officers arrived at the Short Creek community square, car sirens wailing, red lights flashing, spotlights glaring. The posse was accompanied by national guardsmen, the Arizona attorney general, superior and juvenile court judges, policewomen, nurses, doctors, twenty-five carloads of newspapermen, and twelve liquor control agents. They expected to find the community sleeping. Instead they found most members of the colony grouped around the city flagpole singing “America” while the American flag was being hoisted.
By dawn the entire town was under martial law. Each home was carefully searched. Literature and personal effects were confiscated by the officers. Women and children were rounded up while the national guard set up road blocks, field kitchens, a radio station, and a medical unit. Witnesses familiar with community members began the process of identifying the leaders of the communal “United Effort Plan.” Governor J. Howard Pyle climaxed the more than two years of planning that had gone into the raid by issuing a radio report that Short Creek was “dedicated to the wicked theory that every maturing girl child should be forced into the bondage of a multiple wifehood with men of all ages for the sole purpose of producing more children to be reared to become more chattels of this lawless enterprise.” He defended the police action as necessary to quell an “insurrection against the state of Arizona,” and wipe out “a community dedicated to the production of white slaves.” He charged the community with “conspiracy to commit statutory rape, adultery, bigamy, open and notorious cohabitation, marrying the spouse of another, and various other crimes” (Salt Lake Tribune, 27 July 1953).
Though Arizona officials had expected violence from the community, the raid was, in the words of a Salt Lake Tribune reporter, “like a lawn party at a country church.” Younger prisoners joked about their plight, eagerly posed for pictures, and spoke readily with newsmen and officers. But leaders of the Short Creek community did not view the police action as a “lawn party.” LeRoy Johnson, leader of the group, said the raid was the “most cowardly act ever perpetrated in the United States.” Jeremiah C. Jessop objected that “this raid is one of the most flagrant, profane and dramatic acts ever performed. If Gov. Pyle had wanted us to be at a certain place at a certain time we would have been there.… There was no need to spend the taxpayers money on this. Was it for us, or a show for the public?” (ibid.).
Regardless of the motivations behind the raid, officials quickly began the legal processing of Short Creekers. The community Sunday school room became a temporary court chamber. Upon completion of the necessary legal work, the male prisoners were led to private cars and taken to jail in Kingman. Mothers refused to leave their children, all of whom had been declared wards of the state, and it was nearly a week before the confusing array of children and wives could be straightened out by the officials. The women and 263 children were then loaded on five large buses for the 400-mile trip to Kingman.
The buses had scarcely unloaded their human cargo before criticisms of “Operation Short Creek” were launched in the Arizona press. Blatant civil rights violations were pointed out and probing questions asked. “By what stretch of the imagination could the actions of the Short Creek children be classified as insurrection?” the 28 July 1953 Arizona Republic asked. “Were those teenagers playing volleyball in a school yard inspiring a rebellion?” wondered the paper. “Insurrection? Well, if so, an insurrection with diapers and volleyballs!” the editor concluded. “Odious and Un-American” and “circus-like” were typical criticisms published elsewhere.
Difficult questions about the cost of the entire operation followed. The initial funding for the raid was secretly appropriated by the state legislature from a special fund set up to handle such emergencies as “flying hay to cattle in distress” or “in case Elk Hunters became lost.” But costs quickly escalated. The state welfare department incurred expenses of more than $500 per day in caring for the women and children who were confined in Phoenix area homes. In addition, editors of the Arizona Free Press pointed out that attorneys for the 107 Short Creek defendants were demanding separate trials for each defendant. Legal expenses for the 107 trials would be prohibitively high for Maricopa County, where a change of venue had located the trials.
Reaction in Utah was more favorable. The 27 July Deseret News issued an editorial entitled, “Police Action At Short Creek.” “Law-abiding citizens of Utah and Arizona,” the paper began, “owe a debt of gratitude to Arizona’s Governor Howard Pyle and to his police officers who, Sunday, raided the polygamous settlement at Short Creek and rounded up its leaders for trial. The existence of this community on our border had been an embarrassment to our people and a smudge on the reputations of our two great states.” The Deseret News expressed the hope that “Governor Pyle will make good his pledge to eradicate the illegal practices conducted there “before they become a cancer of a sort that is beyond hope of human repair.” Announcing that the Short Creekers were “in no way connected with the Church,” the editorial pointed out that the polygamists were living in violation of both church and civil laws. “As one of its fundamental tenets,” the paper pronounced, “the Church teaches that its members believe ‘in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.’”
The $600,000 “Operation Short Creek” failed to eradicate polygamy from the community. In less than two years the children, many of whom had been placed in foster homes, returned with their mothers to Short Creek. Men returned from their jail sentences to their wives and children with increased resolve to “live the principle” of polygamy. Typical of the determination displayed by the jailed men was Price W. Johnson’s speech before the parole board. One month after his arrest one of his wives petitioned for his release. The board was willing to grant the request provided that Johnson “sign a statement agreeing to straighten out [his] family affairs” and to “conform with the law in the future.” He stood before the group and proclaimed that “having more than one wife … is an essential part of my religious belief, and I firmly believe that if I keep the covenants I made with these women and with my god, I will have them in the eternal worlds after this life is ended; and before I would break these covenants, I would remain in this prison the remainder of my life; yes, before I would break these covenants, I would go to that gas chamber over there” (Baird and Baird 2:27).
The 1953 Short Creek raid was the last large-scale operation against polygamists in America. But one year later Utah district judge David F. Anderson presided over court proceedings which eventually removed eight children from the household of Utah Short Creeker Vera Black, the plural wife of Leonard O. Black, husband of three wives and father to twenty-six children. The Black case was based on the premise that the example of polygamous parents would contribute to the delinquency of their children. Therefore it was charged that the children should be removed from that “immoral environment” and placed in foster homes. When the Blacks refused to sign a sworn statement promising to “refrain from teaching polygamy to their children, obey the laws of Utah regarding polygamy, and teach their children to obey the same,” the court removed the children from the home on 4 June 1954 and placed them in a foster home in Utah County. Defense attorneys immediately filed a writ of habeas corpus and Provo judge William S. Dunford ruled that the children should be returned to the custody of their parents pending an appeal by the couple to the Supreme Court. But the Blacks lost that appeal. On 3 December 1956 Vera Black was ordered to prepare to turn her children over to the State Bureau of Services for Children.
The church-owned Deseret News editorialized that though “separating children from their parents is a heart-breaking and difficult thing to do,” in this case it was warranted: “The continued teaching of children to break the law is an extreme provocation. This practice on the part of parents, as much as abandonment or neglect, justifies the state’s intervention both for the welfare of the children and of society.” The News thought the removal of the children worth the disruption of the home if “the practice of polygamy can be entirely ended among those who still practice it.”
Many Utahns were stunned that a church which for more than fifty years had opposed anti-polygamy statutes could support removing children from a polygamous home. Juanita Brooks, a prominent St. George Mormon historian, was the foremost voice in opposing the court’s ruling and the church’s position. Maintaining that “it is a subject upon which I cannot be silent and maintain my self-respect,” Brooks first wrote the “Justices of the Utah Supreme Court” on 29 January 1956. Arguing that it was difficult to see how polygamy during Joseph Smith’s or Brigham Young’s day was any different than in the present, Brooks agreed that “it has been made illegal now. Certainly people should no longer live it. But when a few, driven by the same convictions that our grandparents had, will continue in defiance of the law, shall we commit a greater crime than theirs in attempting to force conformity?” (Truth, 21 [Feb. 1956]: 311).
In a 1 February 1956 letter to the editors of the Deseret News Brooks expressed dismay at the paper’s 28 January editorial. “I was shocked and saddened,” she wrote, “that the official organ of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should approve of such a basically cruel and wicked thing as the taking of little children from their mother.” Brooks thought the injustice was of historic proportions: “Since the days of negro slavery children have not been torn from parents who loved them and wanted them and provided for them.… In trying to stamp out one evil, let us not commit another so black that it will shame us for ages to come.” Leonard and Vera Black eventually signed an anti-polygamy pledge and the children were returned to their custody.
Public opposition to the handling of the Black case and the 1953 Short Creek raid, plus the unacceptable financial burden on taxpayers, evidently altered the way many Americans, particularly Mormons, viewed prosecution of polygamy. In 1955 and 1956, extensive law enforcement efforts in Utah’s Davis and Salt Lake counties netted only four polygamists. The 21 November 1955 Newsweek attributed the poor showing to “little cooperation from sympathetic Utahans.” The magazine added that “citizens were irked by the fact that the drive against the Fundamentalist sect was being financed by a $20,000 appropriation made by the 1954 legislature—a secret appropriation never revealed to press and public.” The periodical found the Mormon pulse when it observed that “many a Utah Mormon takes quiet pride in his polygamous forebears and is inclined to be lenient toward the Fundamentalists.”
The last concerted attempt in Utah to prosecute polygamy occurred in 1960. After six months of questioning witnesses, a grand jury indicted fifteen people on various charges. A single individual was cited for illegal cohabitation, but he evaded arrest.5
1. Copies of such statements can be seen in the Stanley S. Ivins Collection and Truth, 1 (March 1936): 128.
2. This act was reportedly drafted by Hugh B. Brown, a prominent attorney who later become a member of the First Presidency.
3. Hugh B. Brown, European mission president, writing to explain church action against polygamists, said: “Much publicity has been given to the prosecution recently of certain members of a group of apostates who are alleged to be practicing polygamy, but most of the papers have been fair enough to point out that this group is in no way connected with the Church. The Church has in fact assisted in obtaining the information leading to the indictments, and a ‘Mormon Elder’ is the prosecuting attorney” (MS, 106 [July 1944]: 795).
4. Apostle Melvin J. Ballard, who had been John Y. Barlow’s mission president in the Northwestern States Mission, commented on the actions of the leader of the Short Creek Fundamentalists in an 11 November 1935 interview in the Kansas City Times: “[John Y. Barlow] was following his occupation as a farmer last spring, when the church authorities urged Arizona officials to act against him and his followers.”
5. In the decade following the Short Creek raid, thirteen polygamy-related arrests in Utah resulted in nine convictions (Hilton 1965, 73-74). This small number is noteworthy when one considers the number of polygamists in Utah during this period. In 1956 the Utah State Welfare Commission estimated two thousand persons to be living in polygamous homes (Deseret News, 29 Feb. 1956). The Utah Attorney General’s office in 1961, however, reported the number as closer to 20,000 (Cahn 1961). The discrepancy may be related to the welfare’s inclusion of only those polygamists on the relief roles.