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One of the problems with which the American people will soon have to deal is the revival of polygamy in Utah. . . . Mormonism without polygamy largely ceases to be Mormonism. Its whole theological system, from its conception of the Godhead down, is pervaded with sensualism. The Mormon god is not only a just and a vengeful god, but he is a lustful god.
—Burton J. Hendrick, “The Mormon Revival of Polygamy” 

These 375,000 [Mormons] have more political power than any million in the United States because they are a unit. There is little secession among them from the will of their leader, whom they believe divinely appointed to rule them in temporal as well as spiritual affairs. This political force, compact, unreasoning, unpatriotic, un-American, has a curious character, at once sinister and serene. It is the backbone of the Mormon empire, which is an echo from a time that antedates the Christian era.
—Richard Barry, “The Political Menace of the Mormon Church” 

The name of the viper—I take it from the mouth of the viper–is “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.” It lies coiled on the country’s hearthstone, and asks only time to grow and collect a poison and a strength to strike. . . . Mormonism . . . is the Old Serpent, and the heel of every clean American should bruise its head. Its purpose is inimical, and it must either destroy or be destroyed. It is a political menace, a commercial menace. Most of all, it is a moral menace. . . . The battle should continue until all of Mormonism and what it stands for are destroyed. Then, and not before, will this republic be safe.
—Alfred Henry Lewis, “The Viper on the Hearth” and “The Viper’s Trail of Gold” 

Of the men who could have written this narrative, some are dead, some are prudent; some are superstitious; and some are personally forsworn. . . . Since there was apparently no one else who felt the duty and also had the information or the wish to write, it seemed my place to undertake it. . . . I have written, in all candor, what no reasons of personal advantage or self-justification could have induced me to write. I shall be accused of rancor, of religious antagonism, of political ambition, of egotistical pride. But no man who knows the truth will say sincerely that I have lied. . . . The truth, in its own time, will prevail, in spite of cunning. I am willing to await that time–for myself– and for the Mormon people.
—Frank J. Cannon, “Under the Prophet in Utah”   

It is hard to reduce this matter to words but I have a strong sub-consciousness that in all this anti-Mormon agitation here there is a Guiding Hand and that its purpose is to open the minds of the people to receive what will in a little while from now be an overwhelming message.
—Isaac Russell to Joseph F. Smith 

From September 1910 through August 1911, in an unusual confluence of focus, four popular national magazines critiqued the Mormon Church and its prophet in a series of articles that Mormon leader and historian B. H. Roberts characterized as the “magazine crusade” against the Church. All of the articles were written by prominent muckraking journalists who sought both to identify church practices that needed to be reformed and to sell magazines by presenting their critiques in a way that would appeal to Progressive America. The articles did, in fact, have at least two long-term effects on the Church: they accelerated the true demise of polygamy in the institutional Church by increasing the resolve of leaders to discipline prominent Church members who had insisted on continuing to encourage, perform, and enter into new plural unions, and they contributed to the Church’s development of effective strategies to defend itself against attack and its appreciation of the importance of competent public relations. The articles also had the shorter-term effect of re-igniting substantial anti-Mormon activity in the United States and Western Europe. 

By the time the first articles appeared in the fall of 1910, the LDS Church’s leaders and members were well along in their transition into mainstream twentieth-century America. The Church had officially abandoned plural marriage in the fall of 1890 and had reaffirmed the cessation of the practice several times since. It had disbanded its People’s Party and had publicly encouraged members to join either of the two national parties. The communitarian United Order, never fully instituted in the Church, was largely forgotten. Even Church businesses created during the United Order retrenchment of the 1860s and 1870s took on more of a twentieth-century corporate mien. The federal government, believing that the LDS Church was changing in good faith, returned property escheated to the government under the harsh Edmunds-Tucker Act, granted Utah statehood in 1896, and legitimized all children born to polygamous Mormon couples prior to statehood. The Church and its members had worked hard to take their place in mainstream American culture. 

Old concerns about the Church returned and new concerns developed during the first decade of the twentieth century. The United States Senate’s investigation of Reed Smoot from 1904 to 1907 created doubts about the Church’s sincerity in its abandonment of plural marriage. Smoot was allowed to retain his seat in the Senate in early 1907, largely through a partisan vote by Republicans (who were then in the majority). The election of a sitting Mormon apostle as a senator and Mormon leaders’ apparent ability to exercise sufficient influence in the Republican Party to save Senator Smoot’s seat in the face of significant opposition from evangelicals, Progressives, and women created concerns about the Church’s political ambitions. The Church’s growing financial prosperity and alliances with the so-called Sugar Trust and other Wall Street-related interests opened it to criticism by Progressives leery of monopolies. 

The Magazine Crusade articles, all written by prominent “muckrakers,”fanned these concerns about an alleged new Mormon material kingdom that purportedly included the secret continuation of the old practice of polygamy, a revised political agenda whose aspirations went far beyond Utah’s borders, and a new friendship with Wall Street. With a combined circulation of over 2,000,000, the monthly periodicals Pearson’s, Everybody’s, McClure’s, and the Cosmopolitan reached into every part of the United States.The reasons the four magazines would all publish articles on the Mormons are somewhat elusive but provide insight into both perceptions of Mormons in the second decade of the twentieth century and into the world of Progressive magazines. 

In September 1910, Pearson’s Magazine began publishing a three-part series by Richard Barry, a rising star in the muckraking journalism world.It was followed in December by Everybody’s Magazine, which in that month began publishing Frank J. Cannon’s autobiographical, nine-installment “Under the Prophet in Utah” articles written in collaboration with Harvey J. O’Higgins.Cannon was the second son of prominent Church leader George Q. Cannon, and had served as one of Utah’s first U.S. senators from 1896 to 1899, and as a political and financial representative of the First Presidency from the late 1880s through the 1890s.Cannon was a gifted writer and orator, and O’Higgins was an unusually talented writer, novelist, playwright, and muckraker.In January 1911, the pre-eminent muckraking periodical, McClure’s Magazine, published the first of two articles written by future three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Burton J. Hendrick.Finally, not wishing to be left out, William Randolph Hearst’s flagship magazine, the Cosmopolitan Magazine, embarked on an outrageous three-article series penned by Alfred Henry Lewis, likely the most prominent political journalist of his day, which appeared in March, April, and May 1911.Lewis employed the metaphor of a “viper” throughout the articles, portraying an insidious, dangerous Mormon kingdom ready to control America and its resources, just the way it allegedly controlled Utah and much of the West at the time. 

Not surprisingly, all of these series examined allegations of secret “new” polygamy encouraged and practiced in the Church, there-by focusing on what Americans and Europeans had always found both most distasteful and most absorbing about the Mormons. All of the magazines other than McClure’s also re-cast historical concerns about Mormon ambitions to control politics in Utah into supposed long-range political plans by Church leaders to control first the West then, ultimately, the entire country. These same three magazines finished by channeling Progressive America’s mistrust of Wall Street and the combinations and monopolies it spawned into fear and mistrust of the LDS Church’s apparent alliances with Wall Street. Although all of the articles were critical of the Church, there was a wide range of criticism, from the relatively careful and objective pair of articles in McClure’s Magazine that focused primarily on polygamy at one end of the spectrum to the sensationalized series of articles published by the Cosmopolitan Magazine at the other end. 

The Mormon community characteristically reacted negatively and perceived the articles to be the result of conspiracy and persecution against the Church and its leaders. Many of the faithful in Salt Lake City believed that the entire crusade against them had been fomented and perhaps even paid for by such Church enemies as Thomas Kearns and Frank J. Cannon. In fact, however, though Frank Cannon probably was the catalyst for the Magazine Crusade and Kearns accommodated the writers who came to Salt Lake City to research the Mormons, most or all of the magazines were not attempting to destroy Mormondom; they were simply publishing articles that purported to expose practices most Americans found distasteful, thereby prompting reform and, not incidentally, selling magazines. 

The attacks on the Church followed a pattern often taken by the Progressive magazines in exposés of other institutions. The muckrakers had a native mistrust of centralized power and of the men (and, in some cases, women) who exercised that power. Most actively sought to expose nefarious acts of offending institutions and to demonize the individuals who controlled them.At the same time, they were maintaining or increasing circulation and profits for their magazines by appealing to Progressive America’s concerns about concentrated power and unchecked corporate greed. With the Mormons, the journalists and their magazines were also able to take advantage of continuing disgust with a marriage practice that seemed alien to most Americans. 

The Mormons mounted defenses to the allegations. Much of the response consisted of statements that the new attacks were simply part of the long tradition of persecution against the Church. Some of it consisted of attacking the attackers with ad hominem charges addressing their peccadillos. A new, more sophisticated and positive approach to defending the faith emerged during the Magazine Crusade, led by Isaac Russell, a brilliant young journalist and muckraker living in New York who was also a member of the Church.Russell marshaled a defense, enlisting former President Theodore Roosevelt to pen a spirited letter supporting the Mormons, which Russell arranged to have published in Collier’s Weekly, one of the nation’s most popular weekly magazines. As Russell helped guide Church leaders through the challenges of defending against overstated and sometimes biased attacks, the Church began to learn the art of public relations, sometimes responding openly and directly, other times more subtly and obliquely. 

The adverse publicity also moved some Mormon apostles to argue more vigorously than before that men who married polygamously after Church president Wilford Woodruff’s September 1890 Manifesto should be disciplined by being released from positions in the Church, and that those who persisted in “new” polygamy after Joseph F. Smith’s 1904 “second manifesto” be subject to more punitive measures such as disfellowshipment or even ex communication. 

Allegations of the Church’s Expanded Political Ambitions

Pearson’s started the Magazine Crusade in September 1910 when it published Richard Barry’s “The Political Menace of the Mormon Church.” Barry was in Denver researching another article when Pearson’s received word that competitor Everybody’s Magazine was planning to publish a major series of articles on the Mormons written by former Mormon and U.S. Senator Frank J. Cannon. The editor of Pearson’s, sensing the opportunity to capitalize on a compelling storyline, immediately sent Barry to Utah to do “quick work on a similar story.”Barry later claimed in his Pearson’s articles that he had spent considerable time in Utah doing research and getting to know the Mormons, but he did not disclose his sources.Isaac Russell disdainfully claimed that Barry had simply “stopped over between trains on his way to Reno” and had gotten almost all his material “from the Kearns office,” referring to the Salt Lake Tribune, which was owned by Thomas Kearns,but B. H. Roberts acknowledged meeting with Barry several times before his articles appeared and hoping that what he had said to Barry “would have influenced him” to write positively about the Church and its leaders. Unfortunately, Roberts was “utterly disappointed” in his hope that Barry would present a favorable view of the Mormons. 

In “Political Menace,” Barry touched on themes that were repeated in most of the articles that came after.He focused first on Joseph F. Smith, “an old man with five wives and forty-three children,” who was a powerful millionaire in the Mountain West, a political friend of William Howard Taft, and a power on Wall Street. Barry did not find President Smith very impressive—he criticized his intelligence, his oratorical skills, his political abilities, and his business acumen. Barry concluded that Smith was not self-made but was powerful because of his position and because his people believed him to be in direct communication with God. In light of this, believing Latter-day Saints were prepared to follow his counsel even in political matters. Barry argued that, with political control over a large group of people with common beliefs, President Smith and his fellow Church leaders controlled Senate elections in Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming, and likely would be able to do the same in Arizona and New Mexico soon, and con templated exercising disproportionate influence and even control in Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. As Barry wrote, “When they want one of these states, they will get it. Because of the obedience of its members the power of the Mormon Church is entirely disproportionate to its numbers.” 

Everybody’s and the Cosmopolitan subsequently also addressed the alleged growing political ambitions of the Mormon Church.

The account by Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O’Higgins in Everybody’s described the Church’s political activities from Cannon’s first-hand perspective. He took credit for (and was certainly instrumental in) the political compromises that led to the Woodruff Manifesto in 1890 and the decline of polygamy prosecutions, the restoration of Church assets confiscated by the federal government under the Edmunds-Tucker Act, the legitimization of children born to polygamous unions, and, finally, statehood for Utah, which came in 1896. Cannon argued persuasively that the United States government and the Mormon Church had entered into a “compact” by which the Church would end polygamy (even polygamous cohabitation of spouses married earlier) and would also end political control over its members. Though Church leaders in 1911 vigorously denied any formal agreement with the federal government, Wilford Woodruff had, in fact, announced the formal end of plural marriage, and he and others testified publicly a year later that that included the end of cohabitation. Church leaders also disbanded the People’s Party, publicly encouraging Church members to join the national parties. 

“Under the Prophet in Utah” provides rich background for the political environment of Utah in 1910 and 1911. Frank Can non recalled his participation in the organization of the Republican Party in Utah, his elections as territorial delegate and U.S. senator, his shifts from the Republican Party to the Silver Republican Party to the Democratic Party to the American Party. He described the difficult 1898 election, when he was seeking reelection to the Senate. His father, George Q. Cannon, decided to enter the race against him at Church leaders’ insistence, with the result that the Utah legislature became deadlocked and elected no senator that year, leaving only one senator from Utah in Washington for the next two years. He told of continuing Church influence exercised by Joseph F. Smith, of the rancorous elections in which Cannon’s American Party battled against Church influence, and of the Church’s abandonment of Thomas Kearns as senator and its replacement of him with George Sutherland in 1904. Cannon described the Smoot hearings and the lies (as he perceived them) spoken by Joseph F. Smith in testimony there. 

Most of Cannon’s masterpiece is history and autobiography and is fundamentally different from the series of articles that appeared in the other magazines. Only in the final chapter of “Under the Prophet in Utah,” which appeared in the August 1911 issue of Everybody’s, did he address the current political climate of Utah, echoing allegations already made by Barry that one man dominated Utah politics and meant to dominate regional and even national politics: 

The Prophet of the Church rules with an absolute political power in Utah, with almost as much authority in Idaho and Wyoming, and with only a little less autocracy in parts of Colorado, Montana, Oregon, Washington, California, Arizona, and New Mexico. He names the Representatives and Senators in Congress from his own state, and influences decisively the selection of such “deputies of the people” from many of the surrounding states. Through his ambassadors to the government of the United States, sitting in the House and Senate, he chooses the Federal officials of Utah and influences the appointment of those for the neighboring states and territories. He commands the making and unmaking of state law. He holds the courts and the prosecuting officers to a strict accountability. . . . He has enslaved the subjects of his kingdom absolutely, and he looks to it as the destiny of his Church to destroy all the governments of the World and to substitute for them the theocracy—the “government by God” and the administration by oracle—of his successors in office. 

Much of “Under the Prophet in Utah” is a call to action, and Cannon completed his political diatribe by calling for his readers to end Joseph F. Smith’s influence in Washington. Break “his power as a political partner of the Republican party now—and of the Democratic party, should it succeed to office—and every ambitious politician in the West will rebel against his throne.” By breaking Smith’s power over politicians and commercial agencies, the “civilized world” would join in overthrowing the “tyrannies” of the Prophet. 

To Alfred Henry Lewis, addressing the same themes reviewed by Barry and Cannon, a political and evil “viper” was lurking in the United States, the material kingdom of the Mormon Church. “The name of the viper—I take it from the mouth of the viper—is ‘The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.’ It lies coiled on the country’s hearthstone, and asks only time to grow and collect a poison and a strength to strike.” Lewis’s venomous “Viper” articles described the political designs of the Mormons in even darker language than his fellow muckrakers had done. He continued: 

Mormonism is growing and spreading and creeping over the face of this people like ivy on a wall, and all upon Mormon assumption that a day is surely to dawn when it will poisonously cover the whole. . . . Politically, [the Mormon Church] holds Utah in the black hollow of its hand. As a balance of power it controls, for what purposes it has in view, Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, and New Mexico. Aside from these, it is of convincing political weight in both Oregon and Washington. No party, whether Republican or Democratic, would defy the Mormon influence in any of these states. 

Lewis went so far as to say that “the Mormon Church might in any campaign be easily strong enough to make or mar a White House.”Lewis’s articles were illustrated to make the same points visually. In one cartoon, Joseph F. Smith, from the Salt Lake Temple, is pulling the strings of Reed Smoot, controlling his every move. Senator Smoot, in turn, is holding and pulling the strings of his fellow senator from Utah, George Sutherland, all senators from California, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming, Senator Clark from Montana, Senator Nixon of Nevada, and Senator Heyburn of Idaho. The only Western senators not being controlled by Smith and Smoot in the cartoon are those who either voted against Senator Smoot’s seating in the Senate or somehow managed to avoid voting on the issue at all.In another cartoon, the Cosmopolitan drew on other Progressive caricatures by depicting Joseph F. Smith as an octopus, with his snake-like tentacles wrapped around railroads, mining, farming, schools, “the home,” and even the U.S. Congress. 

B. H. Roberts later wrote that “so personal and bitter were the Cosmopolitan articles and so viciously illustrated, that the writer defeated his own ends, or they brought the author and the publishers more censure than praise.”Even Frank J. Cannon found the “Viper on the Hearth” articles to be sensationalized and inaccurate. 

Charges of “New Polygamy” 

Not surprisingly, all of the magazines included articles about the “new polygamy.” Evangelical Protestants, journalists, politicians, and many Americans had been expressing outrage at the Mormon system of plural marriage since before its official announcement in 1852. Outcry had quieted down for a time after the Manifesto, but disclosures made in the Smoot hearings of secret new polygamous activity and new disclosures by the Salt Lake Tribune from November 1909 on gave ammunition to writers wanting to expose improper practices and to sell magazines. The assertions were given credibility by the LDS Church’s earlier failure to disclose the secret practice of polygamy under Joseph Smith in Nauvoo, Illinois, and under Brigham Young in Utah. The marriage system had been instituted among high-ranking Church authorities in the early 1840s, but the practice was denied until its public announcement by Orson Pratt in 1852. New stories of Mormon leaders continuing to secretly encourage, enter into, and perform such marriages after 1890, supposedly in large numbers, while the Church asserted the practice had ended, seemed to mirror these earlier denials. Ironically, sanction of the practice by the Church president, at least in the sense of authorizing new marriages, appears to have ended in April 1904, and by 1910, Mormon plural marriage was in serious decline. Only a small number of Church leaders was continuing to promote the practice. 

The muckraking journalists simply assumed that a substantial number of Mormons had continued to marry in polygamy at the behest of Church leaders, and they either ignored or did not fully appreciate the distinction between marriages solemnized between September 1890 and April 1904 and those performed after April 1904. Having made this assumption, each of the magazines attempted to explain why Mormons would secretly continue their practice of plural marriage after it had caused so much controversy and difficulty in the past. Richard Barry argued that polygamy was the “keystone to [the Church’s] gigantic arch,” and that Mormons had little choice but to continue the practice.Just as the Church had led a “double life” in the early days of polygamy, when the practice was publicly denied, during the new “recrudescence period” since 1896, it now engaged in similar duplicity. Once Utah obtained statehood, providing Mormons with a level of independence and autonomy from the federal government, “the lizard of polygamy now basks in the sun of statehood, not at all ashamed and very little afraid.” Barry wrote that, while polygamy and unlawful cohabitation had been prosecuted aggressively in the 1880s and even into the 1890s, now the state courts and county officers in Utah and in counties in neighboring states near the Utah border were controlled by the Mormons and no one was being prosecuted for these offenses. 

Though the allegations of new polygamy were overstated, the most significant insights into the reasons for the continued practice came from Burton Hendrick’s pair of articles in McClure’s in early 1911. The articles were both titled “The Revival of Mormon Polygamy.” Hendrick included a discussion of Mormon political control in the Intermountain West but, in fact, devoted his articles largely to the “revival of polygamy.”Hendrick had already written critically acclaimed exposés of, among other subjects, the life insurance industry and those who made “great American fortunes” in financing street railways, and he found the Mormon marriage practice at least as disturbing. 

McClure’s was the most respected muckraking Progressive magazine and was widely known for its quality of writing and research.The story of continued Mormon polygamy and reasons for it fit the model of investigative stories the magazine was known for. Unlike the articles in the other magazines, Hendrick wrote relatively little about the Mormons’ alleged political ambitions or their supposed commercial ties to Wall Street. Instead, his two articles focused on polygamy and delved deeply into Mormon theology in an attempt to understand why the Church’s lead ers seemed (from his perspective) so intent upon maintaining the practice, even on a limited, secretive basis, when public and governmental sentiment was so opposed to the practice and had brought so much difficulty to the Church and its members. Hendrick had interviewed First Presidency counselors Anthon H. Lund and John Henry Smith in the fall of 1910, and Lund had been understandably worried about the questions Hendrick had asked. Hendrick’s articles only increased Lund’s worries. 

In his articles, Hendrick took pains to describe the history of Mormon polygamy, the theological underpinnings of the practice, the federal government’s attempts to eradicate it, and the eventual official abandonment of plural marriage, with the attendant admission of Utah as a state. Hendrick argued persuasively that polygamy was central to Mormon theology. As he wrote, “One of the problems with which the American people will soon have to deal is the revival of polygamy in Utah. . . . Mormonism without polygamy largely ceases to be Mormonism. Its whole theological system, from its conception of the Godhead down, is pervaded with sensualism. The Mormon god is not only a just and a vengeful god, but he is a lustful god.” 

In Hendrick’s view, Mormon leaders had become convinced that, to appease the government and pave the way for Utah statehood, they needed to appear to have abandoned polygamy. They accomplished this through the Manifesto in September 1890 and in later sworn testimony in 1891, in which the highest-ranking leaders stated that the Manifesto meant not only that new plural marriages could not be solemnized but also that cohabitation by polygamous couples married before September 1890 must cease. As Hendrick saw things, in actuality, the apparent end of plural marriage was simply a ruse to get government officials and Americans generally to believe that the Church had abandoned polygamy. With the good will that followed the apparent cessation of polygamy, Utah quickly attained statehood and substantial autonomy. With this local control, Church leaders had quietly but quickly begun approving new plural marriages and openly counseled polygamist husbands to continue to cohabit with their wives. By the early 1900s, the Church had sufficient political power and financial wherewithal that few government officials would dare attack the Church for fear of losing the Mormon vote and, thereby, office. According to Hendrick, with the comfort of statehood and the necessary obeisance to the Church by politicians in many Western states, it was small wonder that not only did Mormon polygamous couples continue to cohabit but that Church leaders also authorized and performed new marriages. 

Much of Hendrick’s second article was devoted to identifying general and local Mormon leaders implicated in the practice, including seven apostles, photographs of whom appeared prominently on a single page in the article. He detailed the late marriages of the seven apostles. Hendrick also wrote that plural wives were hidden from public view in “polygamous cities of refuge,” including the Forest Dale suburb of Salt Lake City and Mormon colonies in Mexico, Canada, and even Hawaii. Hendrick referred to the Church as a “great secret society” with members “oath-bound, under the most frightful penalties.” 

Frank Cannon’s contributions to the exposures of new Mormon polygamy came mostly from his personal experiences. Frank was the brother, cousin, and close friend of post-Manifesto polygamists, and he had reason to know about the practice. He did not, however, expose all that he knew. He incorrectly attributed the pressure to maintain plural marriage to Joseph F. Smith, and described his father, George Q. Cannon, as the principal force behind the Manifesto and as the person attempting to hold Smith in check, when in fact it was his father who until his death in 1901 spearheaded new polygamy.In an important contribution to muckrakers’ allegation that Mormons violated both the law of the land and that of their Church by continuing to cohabit with their wives, Frank Cannon alleged that there was no “tacit understanding” between LDS leaders and government officials that cohabitation could continue if new marriages ceased. According to Can non, the Church had, in fact, made clear to polygamists shortly af ter the Manifesto that they were to stop cohabiting with their plural wives after the Manifesto and used the example of his uncle, Salt Lake Stake president Angus M. Cannon, as one who in fact stopped cohabiting with all his wives for at least a time after the Manifesto. 

Frank had been editor of the Salt Lake Tribune from late 1904 through July 1907.His wife, Mattie Brown Cannon, died unexpectedly on March 2, 1908, at the age of fifty.Frank then moved to Denver, depressed over the untimely death of his wife and discouraged by Reed Smoot’s retention of his Senate seat. Despite leaving the Tribune, he maintained a close relationship with Thomas Kearns and editors and reporters at the paper and was kept apprised of (and no doubt aided in) the Tribune’s publication of lists of “new polygamists” beginning in November 1909.Cannon referred in “Under the Prophet” to the lists of new polygamists published by the newspaper.More importantly, Cannon drew a distinction between the “old” polygamy practiced before the Manifesto and the “new” polygamy since. To Cannon, the child of a plural union whose mother was very much alive in 1911, the “old” polygamy under which his parents had married, though misguided and extremely burdensome to women, was “exalted” and “sanctified.” The Mormon community respected the practice as a “sacrament ordained by God.” Men openly acknowledged their wives and children. The “new” polygamy, on the other hand, was carried on clandestinely and those practicing it were protected 

by a conspiracy of falsehood that is almost as shameful as the shame it seeks to cover; and the infection of the duplicity spreads like a plague to corrupt the whole social life of the people. The wife of a new polygamist can not claim a husband; she has no social status; she can not, even to her parents, prove the religious sanction for her marital relations. Her children are taught that they must not use a father’s name. They are hopelessly outside the law—without the possibility that any statutes of legitimization will be enacted for their relief. They are born in falsehood and bred to the living of a lie. 

To Alfred Henry Lewis, the Church continued to sponsor polygamy as a means not only of enslaving women, but also of enslaving men and keeping all members from escaping its viper-like constriction around them. 

Let us take up polygamy, and the reason the Mormon Church so clings to it. Mormonism . . . is a religion of gloom, of bitterness, of fear, of iron hand to punish the recalcitrant. It demands slavish submission on the part of every man. It insists upon abjection, self-efacement, a surrender of individuality on the part of every woman. The man is to work and obey, the woman is to submit and bear children. Each is to be for the church, hoping nothing, fearing nothing, knowing nothing beyond the will of the church. Also, the prophet is to be regarded as the soul and voice of the church. . . . [The doctrine of many wives] serves ignobly to mark the church’s members, and separate and set them apart from hostile Gentile influences. . . . The Mormon women are beings disgraced among the Gentiles; they must defend polygamy to defend their good repute. The children of polygamous marriages—like Apostle Smoot—are beings disgraced among Gentiles; they must defend polygamy to defend their own legitimacy. Thus polygamy acts as a bar to the members’ escape. 

Mormon Alliances with Big Business 

The third allegation most of the Magazine Crusade periodicals made was that the Mormons and “big business” had developed a close alliance. Under the leadership of Joseph F. Smith, the Church had moved from its communitarian roots. It now controlled banks as well as much of regional commerce in the Intermountain West, and actively participated in some of Wall Street’s trusts and monopolies, which much of Progressive America mistrusted. President Smith was the president of tens of businesses and was sometimes seen in the company of Henry Have meyer, who controlled the Sugar Trust, E. H. Harriman, who incorporated the Union Pacific Railroad in Utah largely to curry Mormon favor, and other corporate titans. This new story of the friendship between the Mormon Church and “big business” add ed to allegations of the extraordinary material kingdom being developed by the Mormons. It was also clearly intended to increase interest (and outrage) among Americans, many of whom had grown to view “the trusts” as bad for America. 

Richard Barry discussed the business schemes in which Mormon leaders and their Church invested: banks, mines, salt companies, farm equipment manufacturers, railroads, electric utilities, and newspapers. Joseph F. Smith, as “trustee-in-trust” of the Church’s finances, oversaw and directed without review or audit expenditure and investment of the millions collected in tithing revenue.Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O’Higgins focused not only on Mormons’ payment of tithes and offerings, estimated at $2,000,000 to $3,000,000 annually, which Joseph F. Smith controlled without accounting, but also on the cost to the LDS community of all the Mormon businesses Church members were directed to use. Mormons (and local Gentiles) were forced to use Smith-controlled railroad and streetcar companies for freight and travel at above-market costs, Mormon farmers were forced to sell their sugar beets at below-market rates to sugar factories con trolled by Joseph F. Smith and his cronies, Mormons bought insurance from companies whose president was Joseph F. Smith, Mormons banked with financial institutions controlled by the prophet, they read the Deseret News (described by Cannon as “dis honest, unjust, and mendacious”), and they bought their farm implements and clothes and amusement all from businesses con trolled by Joseph F. Smith because they understood that these were “the Church’s institutions.” To Cannon and O’Higgins, these were not businesses owned by the LDS Church; they were owned by the “Prophet of Mammon” and his “courtiers.” According to the authors, not only were Mormons gouged by these businesses, they also needed to purchase their “commercial passports to heaven” by paying tithing and a broad assortment of offerings. This was not all; Joseph F. Smith backed “his financial power with his control of legislation.” He even made sure that no “foreign” intervention could endanger Mormon businesses by his “alliance with the national rulers in finance and politics.” 

To Alfred Henry Lewis, the millions available to the Mormon prophet in tithing and other revenue made the Church attractive to Wall Street, and titans of American finance such as “Mr. Morgan, Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Ryan” dare not “shove from shore, for any money purpose, without consulting Mormon convenience and getting Mormon consent. Mormon gold is a Bourse power, and Wall and Broad streets can be brought to their golden knees at a word from Prophet Smith.”Lewis alleged that the wealth of the Church consisted of real estate holdings larger than the whole of France, Spain, and Portugal combined, gold that “outpowers the Steel Trust or Standard Oil,” and annual tithing revenues of at least $20 million. And the Mormon Church was growing “constantly stronger, not weaker.”To Lewis, Senator Smoot and his political allies made sure that industries in which Mormon gold was invested were “protected.” Lewis challenged Americans to understand that “unless met and checked, the Church of Mormon will one day—and that no very distant day—have this nation conclusively by the throat.”Lewis concluded his memorable series of articles with a final warning to America: 

Mormonism . . . is the Old Serpent, and the heel of every clean American should bruise its head. Its purpose is inimical, and it must either destroy or be destroyed. It is a political menace, a commercial menace. Most of all, it is a moral menace. . . . The battle should continue until all of Mormonism and what it stands for are destroyed. Then, and not before, will this republic be safe. 

The Church Takes Action 

Two types of actions were taken in response to the magazine articles attacking the Church and its leaders: (1) written defenses were prepared and published by various Mormon leaders and writers, and (2) leaders worked harder to make clear that no one was authorized to perform or enter into plural marriages and also began disciplining offending leaders and members. Measures taken internally began shortly after Richard Barry’s second article for Pearson’s, “The Mormon Evasion of Anti-Polygamy Laws,” appeared on newsstands in the latter part of September 1910. 

The First Presidency and Quorum of Twelve Apostles had already been questioning what to do with Church leaders and members who had been involved in new polygamous marriages, at least those arranged after 1904.Some apostles, such as Francis M. Lyman and Reed Smoot, lobbied President Smith to discipline, or at least release from Church position, all offending leaders. Smith was slow to do so, however, likely because of his unshakeable belief in plural marriage as a religious principle and his own involvement in new polygamy between 1896 and 1904.Reed Smoot was particularly sensitive to allegations of post-Manifesto polygamous marriages because evidence of these marriages had nearly cost him his Senate seat.Although the Salt Lake Tribune had for almost a year been publishing lists of men who had allegedly taken polygamous wives since 1890, the discussion of new polygamous marriages in a popular national magazine was more worrisome to Church leaders. 

Burton Hendrick had interviewed First Presidency counselors John Henry Smith and Anthon H. Lund extensively in September 1910. Lund recorded in his diary that Hendrick “was posted upon every [polygamous] marriage reported in the Tribune” and expressed his fear “that with the poor showing which we are making on those cases we will be represented in a bad light.” 

With the pressure of the magazines bearing down, some apostles felt increasing urgency to address cases of new polygamous marriages. In October 1910, just weeks after the first national article on continuing polygamy appeared, the Council of the Twelve discussed the question regularly in their meetings. Anthon H. Lund noted that “the Twelve are in counsel about the new polygamy cases. It is quite a problem with which we have to grapple.” Discussions among the Council of the Twelve about how to deal with polygamists continued for a time on an almost daily basis. The First Presidency issued a letter dated October 5, 1910, to stake presidencies reiterating that there could be no new polygamous marriages. The letter bluntly instructed stake presidents “to make it known to all the Saints in your stake that no one has been authorized to solemnize plural marriages, and that he who ad vises, counsels or entices any person to contract a plural marriage renders himself liable to excommunication, as well as those who solemnize such marriages, or those who enter into such unlawful relations.”On Saturday, October 8, sandwiched between two days of General Conference, the First Presidency called a “special priesthood session.” At the meeting, President Smith and his counselor, Anthon H. Lund, referred to the letter that had just been sent to stake presidencies and again stressed the point that “no one was authorized to celebrate plural marriages.” 

The First Presidency and Council of the Twelve discussed re leasing “all known polygamists . . . marrying since 1890” from all Church positions, but Anthon H. Lund suggested instead that they not present auxiliary organization leaders to be sustained at the October General Conference, and this “was agreed to,” there by avoiding the more difficult question of who were “known polygamists marrying since 1890.” 

As Church leaders took these actions, they also imposed the first serious discipline of prominent Church members for involvement in post-1904 plural marriages. Judson Tolman, a stake patriarch in Davis County who had performed a number of post-1904 marriages and entered into such a marriage himself, likely in 1908, was excommunicated on October 3, 1910.Nine days later, pioneer and Deseret Sunday School Union board member Joseph W. Summerhays was summoned before the Council of the Twelve to defend allegations that he had married in polygamy in 1906. Summerhays asserted that Joseph F. Smith had encouraged him to take a plural wife in 1898 and had authorized his 1906 marriage (an assertion Smith denied to Reed Smoot). Perhaps concerned about whether President Smith had in fact secretly authorized the 1906 marriage, all but two of the apostles decided only to release Summerhays from his positions in the Church. Only Reed Smoot and Francis M. Lyman voted to excommunicate Summerhays.On October 13, 1910, the apostles also decided to “summons M. F. Cowley, John W. Taylor, and H. S. Tanner before us to show cause why they should not be excommunicated from the church for marrying plural wives and performing said marriages.” Disciplinary proceedings were commenced on November 9, 1910, against attorney and city judge Henry S. Tanner, who had served on the general board of the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association for a number of years and had married his fifth wife in 1909. He was eventually disfellowshipped in June 1911. 

In the December 1910 issue of Pearson’s Magazine, publisher Arthur W. Little took more credit than the magazine deserved for the actions taken by the LDS Church to halt new plural marriages. Little congratulated his magazine for the “practical results of the Mormon articles”—reportedly, the unprecedented excommunication of two Church members who had been involved in new polygamy and Joseph F. Smith’s “special sermon . . . urging his followers to cease the practice of polygamy.”Little’s information was not entirely correct, but he was correct in stating that the magazines were having an effect on Church actions against plural marriage. 

Discipline of more important Church leaders followed shortly thereafter. John W. Taylor and Matthias F. Cowley were members of the Church’s Council of Twelve Apostles in 1905 during the Smoot hearings. They had evaded subpoenas from the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Privileges and Elections and did not testify before that committee. Though other apostles had been involved in post-Manifesto polygamy, most were older and many were in ill health. Taylor and Cowley, however, were young and healthy and were widely (and correctly) perceived as being actively supportive of and involved in new polygamy. They had been asked to provide resignations in October 1905, in case the Church needed to divert attention away from the Church president during the Smoot hearings, and their resignations were accepted and announced in April Conference 1906. Subsequently, both had continued to encourage members of the Church to marry in polygamous unions and they had performed many of these late marriages. 

In January and February 1911, as pressure increased in response to disclosures and allegations made by Burton Hendrick in the two McClure’s articles that appeared in those months, summonses were issued for John W. Taylor and Matthias F. Cowley to appear in trials for their Church membership before their former Quorum associates.John W. Taylor was relatively defiant and unapologetic in his trial, and he was excommunicated on March 28, 1911, just as Isaac Russell was obtaining authorization to publish Theodore Roosevelt’s defense of the Mormons described below.Cowley was living in Oregon and though the summons for his trial was first issued in January 1911, a month before Taylor was summoned to defend himself, it took some time for the stake president in Oregon to find and serve Cowley with the summons and Cowley’s Church trial did not take place until May 1911.Following that trial, Cowley was, in the words of Joseph F. Smith, “deprived of all authority in the Priesthood,” with the different treatment from John W. Taylor attributable to Cowley’s “frank and full acknowledgements and explanations and pleas for forgiveness.” 

Reed Smoot spent most of his time in Washington, D.C., and did not attend either John W. Taylor’s or Matthias F. Cowley’s Church trials. But he did continue to present his views to the First Presidency: 

Held a long meeting with the Presidency and presented my view on the present situation on the new polygamy cases and the sentiment of the leading men of the country. The immediate cause of the renewal of the discussion of this subject is the many magazine articles on the Mormon question charging a return to the practice of polygamy by the church members. I again insisted that the only way the church can clear its self [sic] is to handle every new case of polygamy and remove [polygamists] from any position in the church. The church [and] church authorities cannot or will not be believed as to their sincerity in abolishing polygamy if men violating the rule and promise that it should cease are sustained as officers of the church such as Bishops and Presidents of stakes, etc. 

Reed Smoot’s view, supported by quorum president Francis M. Lyman, began to be implemented more widely. Tellingly, the charges against Taylor and Cowley were that they had encouraged some men to marry in polygamy, had performed some marriages, and had themselves been married to polygamous wives since 1904 or 1905.Some of the questions put to Taylor in his trial had involved whom he had encouraged to marry in polygamy, though he refused to answer many of these questions.Two lists of those thought to have been involved in late plural marriage with Cowley were prepared before his trial, and the apostles asked him about many of these people—whether he had encouraged these people to enter polygamy, whether he had solemnized their marriages, and whom he had married in polygamy after 1904.The Maga zine Crusade articles had made it clear to Church leaders that the time for action had arrived. They now sought from these two prominent members of the Church concrete evidence against others who were involved. 

Clearly, Joseph F. Smith had become serious about addressing new polygamy by authorizing Francis M. Lyman, president of the Council of the Twelve, to take disciplinary action against those who had persisted in promoting new polygamy since April 1904. Though the magazine articles did not cause this change in policy, the pressure brought by the allegations in the magazines hastened the discipline that was meted out. This process took time, but the genuine and far-reaching abandonment of plural marriage was wrenching. Local leaders and prominent members who continued to treat plural marriage as a Church tenet that could not be altered and to perform or enter into polygamous marriages were eventually released from their callings and ultimately from the Church. The “Mormon Fundamentalist” movement emerged from this background. LDS Church leaders’ secretive actions during the limited “new” plural marriage between 1890 and 1904 (and, to some extent, beyond) and their careful distinctions be tween views and actions of “the Church” on one hand, and actions by the highest-ranking priesthood leaders on the other, provided fodder to fundamentalists’ claims of divine authority for their marriage practices. 

The Church Defends Itself 

The defenses the Church made to the attacks in the magazines evolved during the twelve months in which the articles were published. Responses from Church leaders and members initially evidenced the not-surprising perception that the Church was, once again (in the eyes of the faithful), the subject of conspiracy by evil and designing men. Mormon reaction to the first of the articles (Barry’s “Political Menace” in September 1910) was immediate. In a signed Deseret News editorial article (unusual for the day) entitled “A Reply to Pearson’s Slanders,” veteran Mormon journalist and attorney S. A. (Scipio Africanus) Kenner bluntly found most of Barry’s factual allegations at odds with reality and criticized them in language no less colorful than Barry’s.The president of the LDS Church’s Eastern States Mission, Ben E. Rich, who incidentally (and ironically) had been a close friend and political advisor of Frank J. Cannon in the 1890s and beyond, wrote a long-winded response, which he submitted to Pearson’s for publication, attacking the article’s character assassination of the Mormons.Rich wrote that Barry’s article had accused Mormons “of being disloyal to their country and falsely charg[ing] them with having taken an oath of vengeance against their nation.” In fact, according to Presi dent Rich, Mormons “had given proof by actions which cannot lie [U.S. military service, including being killed in combat], that they are as true and as loyal to the Government of the United States as are any of the class of citizens that have sworn a professed alliance thereto.” The mission president’s submission was rejected because, according to Rich, Pearson’s did not want to hear “anything [from] the Mormon side of the question.”Joseph F. Smith liked Rich’s defense “refuting the scandalous charges published against the Latter-day Saints, and the General Authorities in particular,” and had a version that was “a little toned down” published as a pamphlet circulated by Mormon missionaries. 

At the same time that the national articles were beginning to appear in late 1910, the Salt Lake Tribune published its latest list of Mormon men it believed had entered into polygamous marriages since the issuance of the Manifesto in September 1890. The list included 202 men.On October 18, 1910, the Salt Lake Herald-Republican (which had been acquired by Reed Smoot’s “federal bunch” in August 1909, making an immediate shift at the time from supporting the Democratic Party to the Republican Party) reported that “the Tribune is certainly getting results from its campaign of defamation of Utah” and referred to Pearson’s “campaign of slander,” McClure’s representative having headquarters in the Tribune office, and Everybody’s having “been persuaded by the Tribune to take a hand.”The Herald-Republican further fanned the conspiracy theories among Mormons when it published reports that Kearns and other anti-Mormon elements in Utah arranged for the articles.The Herald-Republican reports were based on a meeting Senator Smoot had with William C. Beer, a nationally-prominent Republican operative and lobbyist, in early December 1910. Smoot met with Beer in New York City in Beers’ home.Beer told him that the Pearson’s articles “were paid for and if the Mormon church wanted them stopped or other articles in their place they could secure same by paying $1,000 per month more than the parties had been paying for the Anti-Mormon articles.” 

While it was clear that the Tribune was supplying information to the muckrakers, and it is likely that at least Burton Hendrick was lodged at a local club at the expense of Tribune owner Thomas Kearns, it is unlikely that anyone in Salt Lake was paying for the articles. William Beer, who made his living as a political lobbyist and go-between, likely was hoping to get the Church to pay for responsive, positive articles in “certain magazines in the east that are for sale” and to extract a commission from these magazines for placing friendly articles. 

A major course change in the defense of Mormonism came in early February 1911, when Isaac Russell, acting on his own, decided to pursue a different response to the articles.Utah-born Russell, known to friends and family as Ike, who at the time was a reporter for the New York Times and a regular contributor to several Progressive magazines, had been sending letters to the editors of Pearson’s, Everybody’s, and McClure’s magazines, pointing out what he believed were inaccuracies in the articles. None was published, even though Russell knew most of the editors personally and had written regularly for Pearson’s. As he reviewed Russell’s letters, John Thompson, editor of Pearson’s, began expressing concerns to Russell that some of the allegations in Richard Barry’s pieces may not have been entirely accurate and Burton Hendrick corresponded with Russell about his McClure’s articles. 

In early February, Russell launched a new plan, the idea for which he attributed to a “Guiding Hand.”He was unusually enterprising and over the years sometimes covered presidential campaigns. He was particularly impressed by Theodore Roosevelt. Russell appreciated the enormous talents of Roosevelt, but more, he was in awe of both the former President’s fairness and his ability to focus on an issue and develop a strategy to affect it. He also believed that Roosevelt’s “love of fair play” would make him amenable to helping the Mormons.The muckraker sent the former President a letter, indicating that national magazines were inaccurately portraying the Mormons and seeking Roosevelt’s help in responding. More important, Russell pointed out how Richard Barry and others had accused Roosevelt of having made a “corrupt bargain” with the Mormon Church in 1904 pursuant to which the Church 

agreed to deliver to Roosevelt the electoral votes of Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho in exchange for three things: (1) a cessation of the movement and agitation within the Republican party for an amendment to the Federal Constitution giving to Congress the power to legislate concerning plural marriage and polygamous living; (2) a defence of Reed Smoot, Apostle and representative of the Mormon hierarchy, as a Senator of the United States, and for his retention of his seat in the Senate; and (3) a disposition of Federal patronage in Utah and surrounding States in obedience to the wish of the Mormon hierarchy expressed to the Federal Administration through Apostle Reed Smoot. 

Russell hoped to enlist the former President’s help by playing to questions regarding his character: 

I am writing in the hope that you will be so good as to assist me in an effort I am making to have the record made more straight as to Mormon events, by characterizing for me the particular phase of the general situation in which bitter enemies of the Church have constantly used your name. 

Roosevelt invited Russell to visit him in his office at Outlook Magazine for a brief interview. The brief interview became a three-hour discussion in which the former President asked the Times reporter why this cause was so important to him. Russell explained that he had been raised as a Mormon in Utah and believed the articles to be largely false. “I know that these crazy mag azine articles will only make a lot of good, intelligent Americans waste a lot of time worrying about conditions that do not exist and trying to correct evils that have long ago passed out of sight.” Colonel Roosevelt, impressed with the reporter’s resolve, directed Russell to tell him what he thought of the Mormons “and what the facts were as to polygamy.” Russell explained his views, “giving him as true a size up of both problems as I knew how to.” Roosevelt replied that Isaac Russell’s report was entirely consistent with the Secret Service report he had obtained about the Mormons when he was President and “was just what [Reed] Smoot and [Ben E.] Rich told” him years earlier.Senator Fred Dubois of Idaho, who had led the opposition to Smoot in the Senate, had accused the Mormons of secretly continuing to encourage polygamy. The things that Dubois had told him “were just like these things in the magazines. I found them false and fraudulent then and here they reappear.” 

Roosevelt and Russell continued to correspond. After another in-person interview with Russell, Roosevelt was satisfied that the Mormons were being unjustly attacked and agreed to provide “a letter for public use, branding these things as infamies.” Russell gave a draft letter from Roosevelt to Ben E. Rich, by then president of the Eastern States Mission headquartered in New York City, along with a copy of his letter to Roosevelt. President Rich, who was incidentally the uncle of Ike’s wife, Althea Farr Russell, sent the two letters to the First Presidency requesting their views on whether Russell should try to put the documents to use in a public relations campaign by the Church. 

Russell, again following a “Guiding Hand,” then began persuading mentors Norman Hapgood and Mark Sullivan, editors of Collier’s Weekly, the second-most popular American weekly at the time with a circulation of about 1,000,000,to publish Theodore Roosevelt’s letter and an accompanying article by Russell. Hapgood wanted to be sure that anything Collier’s published would be entirely accurate and that Collier’s “ought not to go into the Mormon game while all the other magazines are specializing on it, unless we contribute something of decided importance.” Russell responded that “two apostles” had attempted to “evade the manifesto as to marriages of a polygamous sort” up to 1904. Russell also reported that, according to President Rich, since 1904, the Church “has a perfect score,” that is, that no polygamous marriages had been performed with the approval of the highest-ranking Church officials since then. 

As the First Presidency was left to wonder whether Russell would be able to publish Roosevelt’s letter, Alfred Henry Lewis’s incendiary “Viper on the Hearth” articles began appearing in the Cosmopolitan.The three articles in the Cosmopolitan maintained the powerful viper imagery throughout.Each article was also written in prose that was not only inflammatory, but also colorful and engaging. Lewis’s descriptions of the alleged temple “oath of vengeance,” “destroying angels,” blood atonement, polygamy, political ambitions, and unlimited financial resourcesseemed outlandish to LDS Church members, but the large circulation of the Cosmopolitan Magazine must at the same time have worried the Church. 

As Ike Russell sought to publish Theodore Roosevelt’s letter de fending the Mormons and as the Church’s annual General Conference approached, the April installment of “Under the Prophet in Utah,” which hit newsstands in late March, had included unusually controversial allegations about the Mormons and had sported a cover with a white-haired Mormon prophet sitting in a formal wooden chair over the headline “Utah’s Treason.” This issue also contained a two-page spread of photos of twenty-four members “of the Mormon hierarchy which enslaves men and women in polygamy, and holds the state of Utah under political domination.” 

In Washington, D.C., Senator Reed Smoot watched closely the effects the articles were having on perceptions of the Mormons. He recorded in his diary that he continued to insist to members of the First Presidency that the magazines were having an effect and new polygamists needed to be disciplined. The Presidency responded (naively, in Smoot’s view) that 

They seem to think that the fact that the church has not approved or sanctioned the marriages [means] it cannot be held responsible for them–many of them were authorized by President Cannon. The Presidency seem to be fearful of results on members of church if a wholesale action is taken. I am of the opinion non action will have a worse effect especially upon the young people. 

Smoot knew first-hand the devastating effects that national media reports could have and strongly urged the Presidency to prepare a forceful response to the articles that Smoot would “try and have the Associated Press carry in full.” 

About the same time, Smoot learned that Frank J. Cannon would soon begin lecturing nationally on the Chautauqua and Lyceum circuits, and he urged the Church leaders to authorize him to have the non-Mormon editor of the Salt Lake Herald-Republican, LeRoy Armstrong, prepare an article “for publication in some of the leading magazines on the life of F. J. Cannon” that would “dis credit” Cannon by letting the American people “know about his true life and character.” Smoot planned to follow a time-honored tradition of ad hominem attacks on the attacker. On a more substantive level, Smoot continued to 

call the question of new polygamy cases up for consideration. Began to tell them of the danger to the church of holding men entering into polygamy since the manifesto in office and stated it was my opinion that we should drop them from all positions where people are asked to vote for them. If we do not do so we cannot convince Pres. Roosevelt or the American people that we are honest or sincere.” 

At the same meeting in which Senator Smoot again voiced his view that the Church needed to respond aggressively, he spoke of Theodore Roosevelt’s letter to Isaac Russell and of Russell’s desire to publish the letter in Collier’s Weekly. Ironically, Smoot, who wanted in the worst way to “answer” the charges made by the national magazines, was concerned about Russell publishing Roosevelt’s letter in a popular periodical. The reason was simple. Smoot had read Roosevelt’s letter to Russell and knew that the colonel had included the following warning to the Mormons: 

If the accusations made against the “Mormons” are as false as the accusations upon which I have touched above, there is no need of my saying anything. But let me most earnestly insist on the vital need, if there is the slightest truth in any of these accusations, of the “Mormon” people themselves acting with prompt thoroughness in the matter. . . . The people of the United States will not tolerate polygamy; and if it were found that, with the sanction and approval or connivance of the “Mormon” Church people, polygamous marriages are now being entered into among “Mormons,” or if entered into are treated on any other footing than bigamous marriages are treated everywhere in the country, then the United States Government would unquestionably itself in the end take control of the whole question of polygamy, and there could be but one outcome to the struggle. In such event, the “Mormon” Church would be doom ed, and if there be any “Mormons” who advocate in any shape or way disobedience to, or canceling of, or the evading of, the manifesto forbidding all further polygamous marriages, that “Mormon” is doing his best to secure the destruction of the Church. 

Smoot worried about his friend Theodore Roosevelt’s warning and was “in doubt of the wisdom of it [having Russell try to publish the letter] for we know there have been new cases.” 

Smoot continued to stew over the matter, and continued to tell the First Presidency that something drastic needed to be done because the magazine articles were having an impact on national leaders and needed to be counteracted. The Presidency needed to “answer” the “Anti-Mormon articles” in the national magazines, but Russell’s article was not the way. Smoot found President Smith’s response disappointing, particularly in light of Theodore Roosevelt’s warning. “[President Smith] does not understand the feeling of the people. The country will not accept excuses.” Smoot concluded that “it is evident no action against the persons taking polygamist wives before 1904 will be taken.” Smoot even worried that, if the Senate were to commence another investigation into him holding his seat, “I do not know how present position will be justified.” 

The Church continued to feel it was under siege. Though Church leaders by then knew that Collier’s Weekly intended to publish Theodore Roosevelt’s letter, and they hoped that Ike Russell’s ploy would be helpful, that had not yet occurred. Concern was sufficiently high that the First Presidency took the unusual step of issuing a powerful, direct statement denying many of the allegations contained in the muckraking articles.Before the formal statement was made, Joseph F. Smith and apostle Heber J. Grant directed conference remarks to the magazine articles and those writing them, particularly Frank J. Cannon.Smith asked Smoot to line up media coverage for the formal statement. Smoot called Melville Stone, the manager of the Associated Press in New York, who told Smoot that, while he could not promise full coverage, he would try to print a synopsis of the First Presidency statement. 

On Sunday, April 9, 1911, in the closing afternoon session, the First Presidency issued its statement. Heber J. Grant read the statement in General Conference, likely because, though he was not a member of the First Presidency, he was both the best-known Democrat among the higher-ranking officials and now a monogamist, two of his three wives having previously passed away.The First Presidency’s statement, which drew the Deseret News headline “Slanders Are Refuted by the First Presidency, Misrepresented from the First,” started with an attack on the attackers: the new articles simply repeated “old, stale and shattered fabrications” of earlier anti-Mormon writings. Though the Church was inclined to maintain its silence, “there are so many requests for replies, or at least explanations, for the benefit of inquiring minds” that “perhaps it is proper that something should be officially stated for the good of the reading public.” The “mingled nonsense and venom” of the Smoot hearings was now being “poured forth from month and month . . . in present view and in popular form” in the magazine articles and the Church needed to set the record straight. Turning to specific allegations made in the magazines, the statement flatly denied the substance of almost all of the charges leveled at the Church by the Magazine Crusade articles. 

As to allegations regarding polygamy, there had been no formal pledge or agreement between the Church and the federal government; only states could make such an agreement. Tellingly, the statement acknowledged that Church leaders had agreed to end the practice in a petition for amnesty for polygamists delivered to the government in December 1891. The First Presidency’s statement positively averred that “since [the Manifesto] the Church has not performed any polygamous marriage or authorized any violation of the law,” although it recognized that “some persons” who incorrectly believed that marriages could be performed in Mexico had done so. They were stopped by Lorenzo Snow.Lingering rumors of new polygamous marriages had prompted Joseph F. Smith to issue his second manifesto in April 1904. Since then, “such violations of these positive declarations as have been reported, wherever proven by sufficient evidence, have been dealt with by Church tribunals, and offenders have been disciplined or excommunicated.” 

On the alleged political control exercised by the Church, the institution “never assumed to dictate to members politically,… never attempted to dominate the State, and has not done so since the [Utah State] Constitution was framed.” In fact, Church members were encouraged to participate actively in the national parties. Mormons were patriotic Americans and had proven this, among other ways, in their service in many wars.As to the Church president controlling tithing revenues and Church finances, the president did not “claim it or collect it.” Rather, tithing was collected and decisions as to its distribution were made by local authorities whose actions are audited by committees “composed of men well known in the community for their independence and character, and business integrity.” Little was said about the more damning accusations of close alliances between the Church and what Harvey O’Higgins referred to as “the great financial interests that have been called the ‘the invisible government’ in this country.” 

Almost immediately after Conference, Collier’s Weekly published Theodore Roosevelt’s letter and Isaac Russell’s accompanying “explanatory note.” Church leaders (other than Reed Smoot) were ecstatic. Most of Roosevelt’s letter was quite bland and was primarily concerned with setting the record straight on his alleged corrupt deal with the Mormons in exchange for their vote in his presidential election. The epistle did, however, represent genuine support for the Mormons from a prominent national figure—as Heber J. Grant commented in a celebratory meeting of senior Church leaders, “the effect of the Roosevelt article was as though one of the ancient Roman Emperors had written an epistle defending the early Christians, on the ground that Roosevelt is the most powerful figure in the whole world.”Far more interesting from a substantive standpoint was Russell’s accompanying article, which was the only full-fledged national article published in response to the Magazine Crusade articles. 

In his “explanatory note,” Russell invoked a new approach to defense by admitting that the Mormons had not “made a perfect score in cleaning up their polygamy problem,” but he explained that “complete obedience to the edict abolishing it was not to be expected without the invoking of police powers and the administration of punishments.” He stated that, as he wrote in 1911, no apostle advocated plural marriage—of the seven McClure’s identified as continuing to encourage “new polygamy,” “five of them have been long dead” and the other two, John W. Taylor and Matthias F. Cowley, had been disfellowshipped in 1904. Russell was right that no sitting apostle encouraged new marriages, but he was, of course, wrong about when Taylor and Cowley were formally disciplined by the Church.On politics, Mormons historically rarely had much of a choice between candidates because at least one espoused views that all Mormons should be disfranchised. Overall, Mormons and gentiles alike in Salt Lake City had “perspective” on the allegations made by the magazines and all but a “small envenomed circle” knew that the charges were both inaccurate and unfair. 

B. H. Roberts had earlier referred to Russell inducing Roosevelt to write a letter as a “master stroke” and he was even more pleased with the published letter and explanatory note. Joseph F. Smith wrote Russell of his satisfaction at the publication, and noted that “we scarcely need say that the publication has without done, and will do, much by way of correcting the evil effect of the other malicious misrepresentations and falsehoods” against the Church and its leaders. More to the point, he asked Russell how many copies of Collier’s the Church could buy to send to “leading people at home and abroad” and whether the magazine would permit the Church to republish the letter and article in pamphlet form, naturally giving Collier’s credit. 

Reed Smoot was disappointed that, unlike Isaac Russell, he had failed to attract national publication of articles responsive to the Progressive magazine attacks. He had to settle for scathing articles published in the Salt Lake Herald-Republican. As the “Under the Prophet in Utah” articles continued (through August 1911), Frank J. Cannon became the principal target of Church counterattacks and Smoot’s newspaper because Church leaders correctly worried that Americans might find Cannon’s personal narrative more compelling than the other articles and because they believed that Cannon, with the aid of Thomas Kearns, had orchestrated the entire Magazine Crusade. The most notable Herald-Republican article was “The Unspeakable Frank J. Cannon,” which appeared a week after the Collier’s article. The paper stated that “The rules of the postal service forbid giving an accurate description of Frank J. Cannon’s character,” but noted that Cannon had changed political parties a number of times, was a “despoiler of homes” who had “illegitimate children in the streets of Salt Lake at the present time,” had “lived in the lowest resorts in Salt Lake and associated with those whom decent people are loth [sic] to mention,” and had “betrayed every trust that was ever reposed in him, religious, political or commercial, and nothing has been too low for him to stoop to if it gave him funds with which to seek the sort or perversion that most appeals to his debased and corrupt nature. . . . He has been a libertine of the worst character, a drug fiend, and a drunkard.”The Herald-Republican’s character assassination of Frank J. Cannon did little to respond to allegations he and others were making about actions of the Church. 

Collier’s Weekly received both praise and significant criticism for publishing the Roosevelt/Russell piece in April 1911. Russell later reported that the editor of Life Magazine wrote that “‘it was a sorry day for muckrakers’ when [Roosevelt’s] letter came out.” Mark Sullivan, an editor at Collier’s, told Isaac Russell that “‘Harvey O’Higgins was in here, and he was so mad he couldn’t talk, he could only stutter. . . . The folks at McClure’s had called up and had talked so intemperately that it had been necessary to hang up the phone.’” 

Perhaps responding to the anger expressed by O’Higgins but also trying to plot a neutral course, Collier’s then published a series of letters. The first was from O’Higgins, who wrote in response to Theodore Roosevelt’s letter, asserting that Joseph F. Smith was, in fact, fully aware of new polygamous marriages and that Roosevelt’s letter did not add much to the dialogue about “new Mormon polygamy.”Both of these statements were true, but not particularly relevant. O’Higgins carefully avoided criticizing the hugely popular Roosevelt and he also did not address Isaac Russell’s explanatory note in which Russell drew important distinctions ignored by the Progressive articles. 

In an almost unprecedented rejoinder, Collier’s then published a personal response from Joseph F. Smith to O’Higgins’s short piece. This reply was also orchestrated by the erstwhile Isaac Russell, who had begun, with President Smith’s blessing (and modest compensation from the Church) to work secretly against anti-Mormon activities.Smith offered a simple explanation about continued marital relations between polygamous couples married before 1890: “No matter what vindictive individuals may assert, there was a general understanding when Utah was admit ted as a State of the Union that if polygamous marriages were stopped the old relations would not be interfered with.”The “general understanding” may not have been quite as general as President Smith assumed, and the final cessation of new polygamous marriages was not quite as final as he implied, but his per sonal defense was now presented in the country’s second-most popular weekly magazine and in a way that did not seem overly confrontational or defensive. 

The Magazine Crusade made serious enough charges against Mormonism and was so widely presented that it required a powerful response from the Mormon community. At least three separate approaches were utilized in defending the LDS Church from perceived attack: (1) Isaac Russell’s approach of enlisting an extremely popular political figure to publish a letter describing positive characteristics of the Mormons in an extremely popular weekly periodical with an accompanying article that expressed a mild mea culpa but generally defended the Church with what Rus sell believed were helpful facts; (2) the First Presidency’s direct and official denial of most of the charges leveled against the Church, which Church leaders hoped would be covered by the national press; and (3) the ad hominem attacks made by the Deseret News and Salt Lake Herald-Republican against the writer perceived by the Mormon community as the principal culprit in fomenting the Magazine Crusade against the Church, which Smoot also hoped would be covered nationally. 

Not surprisingly, Russell’s level-headed, positive approach was the most successful in counterbalancing the critical articles. His willingness to acknowledge modest wrongdoing on the part of the Mormons with a believable and sympathetic explanation worked well. Also not surprisingly, Joseph F. Smith recognized that adding Russell to an emerging public relations program would be beneficial to the Church and Smith soon employed Russell to secretly oversee defense of the Church from his station in New York City. For the following seven or eight years, Russell used his press connections to stop publication of critical pieces, ar ranged for Mormons to attend and positively disrupt anti-Mormon lectures and gatherings, wrote many letters to newspapers and magazines responding to articles critical of the Mormons, ghost-wrote articles and letters for Church leaders which appeared in leading newspapers and magazines, and disseminated positive stories about the Mormons, their history, and conditions in Utah.Russell sometimes worked closely with James E. Tal mage, who embarked on a positive publicity campaign of his own. Russell would suggest responses the Church should make to written criticisms and would react to ideas Talmage had for publication of books describing positive aspects of Mormon theology and practice. Both had a significant effect on the public image of the Church, though Russell’s influence has been largely unknown. 

Why Did the Magazine Crusade Articles Appear at the Same Time and What Impact Did They Have on Public Views of Mormons? 

Questions persist about the Magazine Crusade. Why were so many articles about the Mormons published in different national magazines at the same time? In October 1910, before anyone knew the Cosmopolitan would publish similar articles, the Salt Lake Herald-Republican attributed the Pearson’s series and the forthcoming Everybody’s and McClure’s articles directly to the Salt Lake Tribune and its owner, Thomas Kearns. According to the Herald-Republican, “Tribune management” and former Idaho Senator Fred T. Dubois, “disappointed, malicious, and vengeful, keeping in mind all the time their policy of ‘getting even,’” had visited New York and “arranged with the editors of McClure’s, Pearson’s, and Everybody’s for the campaign of defamation of Utah which is now in full swing.” 

In fact, the different motivations for publication of the critical articles by the magazines were complicated. The muckrakers were simply doing what they liked to do: exposing improprieties (as they viewed them) of institutions controlled by a small cadre of powerful individuals, creating public outcry for reform of those institutions, and selling magazines. McClure’s and Burton Hendrick probably sincerely hoped to provoke changes in the LDS Church and its leadership, but the era of the great Progressive magazines was ebbing and McClure’s was also focused on its circulation numbers. Frank Cannon was genuinely interested in telling his intriguing story, but Harry P. Harrison, his subsequent employer at the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, wondered if Cannon was not in it just for the money: “Frank Cannon, Utah’s first senator. . . . Was he politician, reformer, agitator, or just a man out to earn a good living?”Thomas Kearns and the Salt Lake Tribune clearly provided much of the information that went into the mag azines other than the Cosmopolitan’s “Viper” articles, but Mormon leaders were extensively interviewed by Richard Barry and Bur ton Hendrick and most of Cannon’s information was first-hand or from friends and family who had reason to know about the matters on which he wrote. Cannon had also been the editor of the Tribune for several years before moving to Denver and much of the Tribune’s information no doubt came from the former sena tor and from his contacts within the Church. Only Alfred Henry Lewis’s Cosmopolitan articles appear not to have used much information from the Salt Lake Tribune or its staff. 

What is relatively clear is that the decision of Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O’Higgins to write Cannon’s story probably started the forces that resulted in all the magazines publishing articles at the same time. Harvey O’Higgins claimed that he and Cannon had spent a year in Colorado and Utah researching and writing “Under the Prophet in Utah.”In the meantime, Cannon shared with Thomas Kearns and others his plan to write an autobiographical series of articles. Pearson’s learned of the anticipated series planned in Everybody’s, thought the subject would appeal to its readers, and sent Richard Barry, in Denver on another story, to Salt Lake City to research and prepare a series of articles of its own. The magazine preempted the first Everybody’s article by several months. McClure’s was also alerted to the forthcoming “Under the Prophet in Utah” and, intrigued, sent Thomas Kearns a letter for assistance in preparing its own series of articles. Kearns offered assistance and McClure’s sent its acclaimed Burton Hendrick to Salt Lake City to research his own articles.Hendrick likely found some of the political and financial allegations against the Mormons hard to believe but he firmly concluded that the Mormons had no choice, based on their theology and beliefs, other than to continue to practice polygamy. William Randolph Hearst saw the commercial attention and success garnered by the Cosmopolitan’s competitors for their Mormon articles and decided to have his magazine weigh in with Alfred Henry Lewis’s Viper articles. True to its reputation, the Cosmopolitan’s articles were outlandish, overstated, and yellow to the core. 

LDS Church leaders were correct in assigning most of the blame of the Magazine Crusade to Frank J. Cannon with likely assistance from Thomas Kearns. Neither Kearns nor anyone else needed to bribe the magazines to publish articles about the Mormons—they recognized the continuing commercial attraction of the quirky Mormons and their quirkier practices, alleged ambitions, and commercial alliances as perfect fodder for Progressive analysis and criticism. The talented muckrakers’ incendiary allegations of new, even darker depths of alien Mormon marriage practices, of unbridled political ambitions, and of financial greed made good copy and sold millions of magazines. 

The articles were intended to provoke Progressive outrage at the supposedly un-American activities of the Mormons, and they succeeded in substantial measure. The editors had their writers subject the LDS Church to the same muckraking techniques and analysis that they had employed against New York trusts, the life insurance industry, the meat packing industry, Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science religion, and any number of other institutions and their leaders. 

The Magazine Crusade re-ignited a period of substantial anti-Mormon activity in the United States and Western Europe. Much of American society had been willing to welcome Mormons to the country’s mainstream when the Church officially abandoned polygamy and ended Church members’ political unity. Utah was admitted as a state in 1896 and reports circulated of how industrious and good Mormons were. Mostly-favorable reports such as Ray Stannard Baker’s 1904 article in Century Magazine contributed to this. Americans found much to be admired in Mormon culture and even Richard Barry, Frank Cannon, and Burton Hendrick sometimes expressed positive views of the Mormon people in their articles at the same time they criticized and demonized Church leaders. Only Alfred Henry Lewis was consistently critical of everything Mormon. 

The criticisms leveled by the Magazine Crusade articles against the Mormon Church contributed substantially to negative perceptions in Progressive America. Reed Smoot even worried at one point in 1911 that a new investigation of him and the Church might be commenced in the Senate and that he might not survive a second investigation.The Deseret News reported in 1913 that “women’s organizations formally affiliated with prominent churches had hundreds of thousands of copies of the Lewis [Vi per] articles reprinted and distributed.”Frank J. Cannon and several others he recruited gave hundreds of speeches around the country from Chautauqua and Lyceum platforms and at National Reform Association rallies from 1911 through 1918 to hundreds of thousands of interested listeners.The Church had to respond to the charges raised in the magazines and from the lecture platform and was fortunate that through the efforts of such men as Isaac Russell and James E. Talmage, it was able to counterbalance much of that negative publicity. 

Though the Magazine Crusade slowed the assimilation of Mormonism into mainstream American culture and fomented continued mistrust and misunderstanding of the Mormon Church, which remains in small ways even today, its effects largely wore off over time. It hastened the demise of plural marriage, and defenders of the Church learned lessons in how to respond to attacks on the Church and began to develop the machinery of an effective public relations program, which helped to counteract attacks against the Church.