Official LDSThe Church's own account
The Gospel Topics essays state plainly that plural marriage was practised openly from 1852 to 1890 under the direction of the church president, that by 1870 twenty-five to thirty percent of the population lived in polygamous households, and that federal law and Supreme Court rulings eventually put the temples themselves at risk. In September 1890 President Woodruff felt inspired to issue the Manifesto. The essays also state, without hedging, that new plural marriages were performed between 1890 and 1904, especially in Mexico and Canada, that a small number were performed in the United States, and that Joseph F. Smith testified he had cohabited with his wives and fathered eleven children since 1890. The Manifesto's scope, they say, had to be worked out by degrees; the Second Manifesto of April 1904 made it prohibitory and attached excommunication. Saints, the current narrative history, tells the same sequence with the human detail restored, including Rudger Clawson's sentencing and Zina D. H. Young's line that the hearts of all were tried but looked to God and submitted.
Faithful / apologeticThe faithful defense
FAIR argues that leaders faced a vicious double bind: had they stopped in 1890 without a revelation they would have been charged with revelation on demand, and had they continued the church would have been dissolved. It notes that Woodruff framed the Manifesto as a personal duty in the first person singular, without other signatures, precisely because he was announcing a course of action rather than legislating for the whole church, and it points to his later statements that he wrote what the Lord told him to write. On the continuing marriages, FAIR follows the Gospel Topics account rather than denying it. On the 1886 revelation, Brian C. Hales grants that the document exists and is in John Taylor's hand while arguing that Lorin Woolley's account of visitations and ordinations appears only in 1912 in outline and in 1929 in detail, after the other named participants were dead, and that nobody corroborated it in full.
NuancedInsider scholarship, reported without flinching
D. Michael Quinn's 1985 Dialogue article is the load-bearing study. He found that ninety percent of new polygamous marriages contracted from September 1890 through December 1904 directly involved church authority, that all three members of the First Presidency either allowed or authorized such marriages, that at least seven apostles took plural wives after the Manifesto, and that during those thirteen and a half years the First Presidency published two dozen denials that any were occurring. Quinn's judgement is not that the Manifesto was insincere but that the messages became so muddy that senior authorities sincerely held contradictory positions, each believing he had First Presidency authorization. Ken Driggs, writing in the same journal, adds that the years 1890 to 1911 were an era of ambiguity and equivocation out of which fundamentalism grew, and that after statehood in 1896 the federal statutes ceased to apply and enforcement relaxed.
Neutral academicThe academic reading
Thomas G. Alexander, writing in the Journal of Mormon History, reads Woodruff's decision as a shift in his own religious imagination: the apocalyptic expectation that had sustained resistance receded, and what remained was the immediate problem of saving the temples and the ordinances performed in them, followed by a period of grace in which statehood could be sought. Harvard S. Heath's account of the Smoot hearings emphasizes that the trial was of the church rather than of the man, that Smith's testimony hurt more than it helped, and that Republican party interest and Theodore Roosevelt's support mattered as much to the outcome as anything said under oath. Demographic work in the same journal, based on family records rather than census inference, finds participation far higher than the two percent leaders claimed in 1885 and varying sharply by town and decade.
Critical / secularThe critics' reading
Critics argue that the Manifesto functioned as a public instrument rather than a revelation. They quote apostle John Henry Smith's reported remark that it was but a trick to defeat the devil at his own game, note that it was edited by Charles W. Penrose, and set the two dozen First Presidency denials of 1890 to 1904 against Quinn's count of authorized marriages. The CES Letter presses a further point about the present: Doctrine and Covenants 132 remains canonized, and men may still be sealed to more than one woman so long as only one is living, so what ended in 1890 was the earthly practice and not the doctrine. The Tanners, from an evangelical position, reproduce Woodruff's 1891 sworn testimony that cohabitation was also to cease alongside diary entries showing leaders privately counselling otherwise, and treat the gap between the two as the central fact.
What it cost people
Thousands of people organized their households, their affections and their children's futures around a practice their prophets said was required of them, and then lived to see it withdrawn. Some men served years in the penitentiary; women were jailed for refusing to testify against husbands; families moved to Mexico or Alberta or lived under assumed names for years. After 1890, some couples separated and some wives were, in Eugenia Washburn Larsen's word, turned adrift, while others reported relief. The people who bore the cost were rarely the people who made the decisions, and the record preserves both the exaltation they believed they were purchasing and the loneliness Emmeline Wells and Martha Hughes Cannon wrote about in private.
The moral question the record poses
The record poses a question about what an institution owes the people it has asked to sacrifice. Leaders who had told the Saints that God commanded the practice told them in 1890 that God commanded its end, and then, for another fourteen years, authorized in private what they denied in public. Faithful writers answer that leaders were caught in a genuine double bind, unable to comply without appearing to have revelation on demand and unable to resist without losing the temples. Critics answer that a bind does not license sworn denials. The record supports the description of the bind and the description of the denials; it does not adjudicate between the two conclusions drawn from them.
What it asks of an institution — and of you
For an institution, this history asks what candour costs and what concealment costs, and whether the fourteen years of ambiguity after 1890 did more damage than a plain statement in 1890 would have. It is also the origin of a durable schism: Mormon fundamentalism exists because a body of believers concluded that the church had traded a commandment for statehood. For a person, it asks how to hold a prophetic claim that was made, lived at great cost, and then reversed, and how much weight to place on official statements about the present when the official statements about a comparable past turned out to be incomplete.
Questions to carry away
- If the Manifesto was revelation, why was it framed as advice in the first person singular rather than as a declaration of the First Presidency and the Twelve?
- Did Wilford Woodruff, George Q. Cannon and Joseph F. Smith understand themselves to be deceiving anyone, or had the categories of sanction, permission and knowledge been redefined until the denials felt true to them?
- What is owed to the plural wives and children whose marriages the church later described as unauthorized, and who were the ones disciplined when the line was finally drawn?
- If Doctrine and Covenants 132 is still scripture and men may still be sealed to more than one woman, in what sense did plural marriage end?
- Would a fuller public accounting in 1890 have prevented the fundamentalist schism, or simply produced it sooner?
