Captured in and by the Records: Historical Sources and Lived Religion

mormons keep good records. This truism describes both the institutional Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the larger religious culture that surrounds it. Writing and preserving historical records means that historians of Mormonism have unprecedented access to the religious practices and worlds of their historical subjects. The proliferation of records also means that scholars of Mormon polygamy have access to sources that shed light on the experiences of those in plural marriages. Since many of the people in queer relationships, interracial marriages, and paper families often did not document their personal experiences, scholars often turn to sources made by those who policed them. 1 Borrowing from social theorist Walter Benjamin, historians have developed methods of reading “against the grain” from the records of institutions that policed and oppressed marginalized communities. 2 The privilege of Mormon historians, then, is that they can write some of their history “with the grain” using the words of their historical subjects. Polygamists have a paradoxical relationship with recordkeeping. In a culture of secrecy and policing, documents about polygamists had the potential to both preserve and endanger their religious lives. The preservation of personal records has enabled scholars to learn directly from the experiences of families who, in a brief period, went from holding a privileged place within their community to being increasingly disempowered. Their marginalization first began with the rigorous enforcement of federal laws in the 1880s, then with the gradual process of social policing as the institutional church began to distance itself from polygamy after 1890. The legal pressure became more than the institutional church could withstand, and in the early twentieth century, it slowly traded its polygamous family culture for the benefits of a public image of monogamy. Polygamists were willing and enthusiastic participants in the recordkeeping process, even during an era of increased policing and secrecy. This process of writing, preserving, and reading documents about families is all a part of their broader religious culture. Government records, on the other hand, captured the vulnerability of polygamists in an era when their lives were increasingly surveilled by their neighbors and the state. Polygamists’ practices of recording their own lives conserve their stories of tumultuous change, yet government records also threatened to betray their families to outsiders. Records, in other words, had the potential to both preserve and reveal family life. In the context of lived religion and American religious history, the story of Mormon polygamists helps scholars see how religious people respond to changing social and legal pressures. Their recordkeeping practices reveal how believers sought to maintain their religious lives while also shielding themselves from outside scrutiny. These records are not just historical sources. They are religious texts revealing belief, devotion, and identity. Polygamists wrote about their families and their faith in ways that reflected both their agency and vulnerability. Government records, by contrast, portrayed them as dangerous or deviant outsiders to American religious and political values. For scholars of lived religion, these documents demonstrate how religious individuals create meaning in the face of marginalization. They also show how institutions—both religious and governmental—shape the ways that people live and remember their faith. Polygamists’ paradoxical relationship with recordkeeping, something they variously embraced and avoided, highlights the politics of capturing lived religion. Records of polygamy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focus on the pressure the federal government put on families. The impact of this discrete period made it a moment Mormons captured and preserved. The two primary federal anti-polygamy laws—the 1882 Edmunds Act and the 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act—fundamentally changed how polygamist families understood their visibility to the outside world. It was not just bigamy (marrying multiple people) that was prosecuted, but also unlawful cohabitation (appearing or being reputed to live with multiple women) and adultery (having sex with those to whom you are not legally married). Over 915 men were imprisoned for crimes related to polygamy from 1884 to 1896. 3 The mass prosecution of polygamous families affected a broad section of the population in Utah territory. Beyond the men accused of polygamy, church members, non-Mormons, and everyone in between were pulled into the prosecution process as witnesses, bondsmen, and jury members. Mormons called this era “the Raid” because of the intense federal surveillance and arrests that marked the period. 4 The transience caused by the Raid, often called “going Underground, ” ranged from staying overnight at a neighbor's house to moving to a different country. 5 The mass disruption of this moment echoed in earlier periods of policing Mormon communities, such as the Utah War and their forcible expulsion from their former communities in Missouri and Illinois. Despite the lack of physical violence in the Raid's prosecutions, the memory of the period melts into a generalized narrative of Mormon persecution. 6Recordkeeping has been an institutional priority for Latter-day Saints from the beginning. In the meeting to organize the early church in 1830, founder Joseph Smith recorded a revelation that began with the words “Behold, there shall be a record kept among you. ”7 This early mandate became a guiding principle for creating and maintaining documents of the young faith. It manifests today in the state-of-the-art archive amply funded by the church. The Church History Library is important, not just because it signifies a commitment to preserving the past but also because of the types of narratives it makes accessible. 8 The victimization of the church and its people is a metanarrative that is easy to preserve and retell. Part of this narrative is informed by the records that the institution kept during and about the Raid. One example is the meticulous lists the Church Historian's Office recorded and rerecorded of the “prisoners for conscience sake” to preserve for future generations. 9 The number of these lists, their meticulous conservation, and their general accessibility to researchers attest to the importance of polygamist suffering to the institutional church. Another part of this is what records are easily available to researchers. It is much easier, for example, to access the records of polygamists being policed by the government than it is to access information about the church's policing of these same polygamists. The scriptural mandate to keep records, therefore, is not a neutral task. Neither is recordkeeping merely a top-down institutional priority. Mormons kept records because they knew their families would read and preserve them. Part of the scriptural injunction to “keep a record” manifested itself in the proliferation of genealogical societies in the 1890s. 10 “Believing that it will be of interest as well as instructive to my children and posterity as time shall pass and they shall look back to trace their ancestry and nationality, I am about to undertake in this book a brief biography of myself, ” thus began Andrew Janus Hansen in his almost three-hundred-page memoir. 11 The men and women of plural families wrote their records, sometimes only a few short pages, and other times lengthy diaries and memoirs, with their families in mind. This culture of valuing and passing down genealogical documents helps explain why polygamists kept records of families that the federal government had criminalized. 12 The work of countless localized family societies and genealogists has contributed to the preservation and memory of polygamists’ records. These organizations exemplify a broader culture of genealogical literacy; every time I present to an audience of Latter-day Saints—historians and lay members alike—people approach me and relate the stories of their ancestors’ experiences of polygamy, the Raid, or the Underground. In other words, Mormons read and preserved the records their ancestors kept. While many polygamist records of the Raid acknowledge the secrecy of the period, this did not prevent them from writing about it. For example, First Presidency member George Q. Cannon kept a long and detailed journal of his life, including during this period of increased surveillance. Secrecy did not inhibit him from writing; instead, he used Hawaiian whenever he talked about “wahine hou” or “my newest wife. ”13 Other men spoke of having codes through which they communicated about marshals in the area. 14 Overall, secrecy during the raid was about visibility. Federal policing did not stop polygamy, or the recordkeeping about it. Instead, polygamists’ secrecy muted polygamous family relationships so that they could appear monogamous to both their community and the government. Polygamist records during this period capture the emotional strain they felt. 15 Many of the polygamous men who served time in the Utah penitentiary kept scrapbooks, trading signatures and poems, with their fellow prisoners. Letters written by polygamists used coded language to record their experiences of the Raid. 16 Many others recorded their memories of the Raid in memoirs, short remembrances, and oral histories. 17 Polygamists highlighted the invasiveness of the government investigating the most intimate parts of their lives. Lorena Larsen, for example, felt safe because of an agreement she had made with the deputy to warn her husband to keep out of the way. Yet in the spring of 1887, he arrived to arrest her husband with three other deputies snooping around their house, “looking in every bed and examining the pillows to try and find out who had slept in the beds. ”18 Stories like this reflect the broader indignation that polygamists felt at having their lives surveilled. Other stories about the Raid are more humorous, highlighting encounters with deputy marshals. One plural wife laughingly remembered how her husband, hiding in the bushes behind their house, had to suppress a cry when the deputy marshal, looking to arrest him, stepped on his toes while he hid. 19 Another polygamist man recognized too late that he was about to pass a federal marshal going the opposite way in his buggy on a narrow road. Since he could not run, the man found a large cigar left by a recent passenger in his carriage and began to smoke because, as his son later said, “there would never be a Mormon there smoking a big cigar like that. ”20 Indeed, the marshal passed him on the road without saying a word. Known for their adherence to a code of health that discouraged smoking, the man masked his religious identity by indulging in a cigar. The number of stories like these shows the broad cross-section of people who were affected by the Raid. These stories of near arrests also highlight polygamist agency, as their families were being scrutinized and policed. Both the institutional church and individual polygamists captured this period in their records, despite the broader legal forces that marginalized them. Polygamist records during the Raid represent an embarrassment of riches for researchers; they show the lived religion of polygamists navigating a legal regime that sought to suppress their families in a new era of secrecy. They also reveal the new practices of secrecy that polygamists used to shed the appearance of plural marriage. For example, newly married plural wives often continued to live with their parents so that they would still look like single women. Polygamous families who lived together split into different households so that they appeared to be distinct families. Polygamists also sometimes adopted fake names to obscure their family identity. Apostle Joseph F. Smith went by the name “Jason Mack” when he was on the Underground. His daughter later recalled, “Nobody knew that name, it was a family secret. ”21 Plural wife Annie Clark Tanner adopted the last name “Wilson” during her years on the Underground. Annie's father was well known in her community, and taking on a fake name and transient lifestyle meant she had to shed the status that her maiden name Clark had given her. 22 Their records of this period, both contemporaneous and memory-based documents, provide insights into their everyday strategies of navigating this unique moment. Government and public records of the Raid, however, capture polygamists in a different light and show parts of the period that many would rather not tell themselves. While many loved relating the moments of their encounters with the marshals, few described the shame of being pressed in court to publicly relate the details of their intimate lives. 23 Plural wife Annie Clark Tanner's memoir A Mormon Mother is a forthright and tragic example of a polygamous marriage in a transitional era. Yet Tanner deferred to the newspaper accounts to tell the story of when her father, also a polygamist, was on trial for unlawful cohabitation. 24 In the absence of personal accounts of these moments, researchers of this period must likewise turn to newspapers and government records for a fuller picture. This is an example of the moments that religious studies scholar Robert Orsi says have “such profound vulnerability and exposure also threaten both humans and holy figures with nonexistence, with disappearance. ”25 The proliferation of records about the polygamous experience, in other words, has limits. Mary Lois Walker, one of the only people I have found who talked about her experience in the courtroom, summarized it as follows: “The thought of being dishonored as a wife, after a marriage of thirty years or more, was neither comforting nor flattering. ”26 Secrecy alone was not what prevented recordkeeping; it was the ambivalence and uncertainty of being isolated from the familial roles that gave one's life meaning. Courtroom transcripts, as well as other government records, captured the things that polygamists did not want seen. Utah's policies for vital records, such as birth and marriage certificates, developed in tandem with the policing of polygamy. The territory had no system for marriage certificates in the 1880s when the federal government began prosecuting the crime of polygamy. Or, as one newspaper summarized, “in this territory there is no law requiring a record to be kept of marriages, and none requiring witnesses to be present, and therefore cannot be proved by the record because there is no legal record. ”27 Unlike other states at the time, Utah territory had no requirement for a public record of legal marriages. Furthermore, in early polygamy trials, church authorities stubbornly evaded attempts from federal prosecutors to find temple records of marriages in Utah. Without public marriage documentation, it was difficult to prove a man had married multiple women. This was something the 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act fixed by mandating that every marriage in the territory “shall be certified by a certificate stating the fact and nature of such ceremony, the full names of each of the parties concerned, and the full name of every officer, priest, and person. . . in which ceremony shall take place, for record, and shall by immediately recorded, and be at all times subject to inspection as other public records. ”28 Marriage certificates in Utah became a method, in other words, of monitoring and documenting polygamous families. Birth certificates, records that documented familial relationships, were also dangerous for polygamists. Prosecutors during the 1880s used the offspring of polygamous unions to determine the husband's identity and the length of the potential marriages. Sometimes, they called on midwives to help ascertain the age and paternity of the infants in question. Yet the memory and compliance of Mormon midwives was not reliable; sometimes they claimed not to remember or keep records of their patients. Anti-Mormons argued in the local Salt Lake Democrat that the 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act mandate to record marriages had not gone far enough; Utah needed public records of births too. Registration of births would make it easier to prosecute polygamists, and the threat of illegitimacy would also make “a young woman shrink from a marriage that brands her a creature of the street and her offspring as the child of no one. ”29 The idea to begin birth registration leveraged a movement, already well established in some states, to better understand infant mortality. 30 Though these laws may seem benign today, birth registration laws in Utah facilitated a means through which the intimate lives of polygamous families could be readily known. Polygamists were right to be wary of birth certificates as a technology of the state. Take for example, polygamist Martha Hughes Cannon, who ended her political career as the first woman elected state senator after she gave birth to her third child in 1899. Ever since the 1890 Manifesto distanced the church from polygamy, church members and leaders had to negotiate its application in their lives and family situations. Detractors used Cannon's birth certificate to show the hypocrisy of the church; here was evidence that polygamy continued. As a practicing physician, Cannon created and sat on the State Board of Health, the main governmental body in charge of collecting birth registration information. Anti-Mormon activist Charles Mostyn Owen used the birth certificate to file a complaint that resulted in Martha's husband Angus's arrest. The scandal ultimately resulted in a 100 fine for Angus, and Martha Hughes Cannon retired from her political career and never to public was a of a polygamous relationship in the vital records after 1890. 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