I had a great conversation with Anne Wilde! Anne is an expert on modern-day polygamy, having been a polygamist herself. She’s the second wife of Ogden Kraut (deceased) and founder of a group called Principal Voices, a polygamy advocacy group. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be discussing a fundamentalist perspective on polygamy. She had some really interesting things to say. In part 1 of our conversation, I had heard of an uncanonized revelation from John Taylor, which reaffirmed polygamy was an eternal principle.
Anne: John Taylor claimed, and I believe, he received a revelation from the Lord regarding polygamy because at that time it was very controversial. The law was very much involved. They were coming out here and arresting polygamists.
He was approached about signing a manifesto of some sort in 1886 in order to get the government off our back so to speak. In the process he received this revelation. It’s only one page, relatively short. But it said in there that the Lord would not change an eternal principle or an everlasting covenant. He said that after he received that, he felt like he could not sign any kind of a compromise. He said that he would rather have his arm cut off or his tongue torn out rather than sign any kind of a compromise regarding doing away with plural marriage.
What many Mormons don’t know is that polygamy did not end in 1890. In part 2, I was surprised to learn that Wilford Woodruff himself may have married another wife in 1897, a year after statehood in Utah.
GT: Do you have any comments on whether you think that 1890 Manifesto was meant for public consumption, but privately we were still going to practice it, or how does that work?
Anne: I don’t know what was in the back of Wilford Woodruff’s mind. I don’t know, other than the fact that he took—as far as we know, there’s pretty good evidence that he took a plural wife seven years after the Manifesto, himself. We also have very good evidence that many of the apostles, the Quorum of the Twelve, took additional wives after 1890. That’s one reason why the 1904 Manifesto had to come out is to put teeth in it because so many people were very quietly taking additional wives, especially in Canada and Mexico.
Anne doesn’t fault Woodruff for the Manifesto. The government was putting tremendous pressure on the church over polygamy, and many members of the church were against polygamy.
- Was the Manifesto a sham simply to get the government of the back of the church and get statehood for Utah?
- Were you aware of Taylor’s purported revelation, or the fact that Taylor was asked to sign a manifesto prior to Woodruff?
- Were you aware of Woodruff’s 1897 marriage?
- Is polygamy an eternal principle?
- What do you think about polygamy in general?
Wheat & Tares 
Interesting stuff. I find polygamy horrible at the same time I feel a need to honor those that sacrificed a healthy (non-polygamous) marriage and family in order to do what they believed God was asking of them. Do I believe it was of God? Seems unlikely. Everything for me hinges on JS relationship with Fanny Algers. While there is never going to be a 100% answer on whether it was adultery or marriage, I lean toward adultery and then polygamy being the excuse JS came up with to validate it over time (along with his need for connection).
I haven’t studied the ending of polygamy, only the beginning and look forward to more on this topic. I did not know about JT’s possible revelation or WW’s later wife.
It seem incredibly offensive though to describe the marriages as ‘So-and-So taking a wife’ as if she were a piece of property with no say in the matter. I’d much prefer phrasing it as ‘WW married _________” so that she along with husband becomes a person rather than unidentified property.
My great grandfather, who served many missions for the LDS church, was sealed to his 2nd wife in 1902–in Mexico (she was from Southern Utah) though his first wife was still alive.
I do believe polygamy should be considered to be an “eternal principle” in that temple worthy LDS men (ex. Dallin Oak) are allowed to be sealed to more than one wife. When we say we “no longer practice polygamy” that isn’t exactly true. In fact, we view temple marriages as the most important form of marriage and so, if sealings to more than one wife is currently available (upon the death of the first wife) then we definitely believe in and practice polygamy
I am deeply troubled by Joseph Smith’s practice of polygamy, post-Manifesto polygamy and especially how it was practiced–lies to Emma etc.
It kinda goes against what we teach–to boldly proclaim the “truth.”
I don’t like the idea of polygamy.
“Was the Manifesto a sham simply to get the government of the back of the church and get statehood for Utah?” Yes. And when they got caught, they had to REALLY disavow it.
“Were you aware of Taylor’s purported revelation, or the fact that Taylor was asked to sign a manifesto prior to Woodruff?” Not specifically.
“Were you aware of Woodruff’s 1897 marriage?” I didn’t remember specifics, but I was aware that church leaders didn’t mean it when they disavowed it, and that polygamous marriages continued.
“Is polygamy an eternal principle?” Only if God hates women and doesn’t see them as equally valuable with his sons.
“What do you think about polygamy in general?” The absolute hands-down worst thing about Mormonism, including that it’s still practiced today by men who are sealed to second wives after their first wives die.
I’m not sure church leaders were in agreement as to what the 1890 manifesto was. I’m sure some saw it as a sham, some felt it was real (albeit temporary), and others were finally glad to be getting rid of polygamy once and for all. I didn’t know about John Taylor getting approached for a manifesto, but I was aware of the 1886 revelation due to some of my own ancestors being allegedly involved. (That was a fun surprise for someone who already struggled with the idea of polygamy.)
“Was the Manifesto a sham simply to get the government of[f] the back of the church and get statehood for Utah?” Yes.
“Were you aware of Taylor’s purported revelation, or the fact that Taylor was asked to sign a manifesto prior to Woodruff?” Yes.
“Were you aware of Woodruff’s 1897 marriage?” I probably was at one time but I don’t remember specifically.
“Is polygamy an eternal principle?” No, I don’t believe so.
“What do you think about polygamy in general?” It’s abusive patriarchy to an insane degree.
When my wife’s cousin left her TBM marriage and took their kids from their father for them to be with her and a freelancing polygamist nut case, I couldn’t stand it. As therapy, I wrote a story, imagining a conceived scenario. At least, as I imagined something like theirs might be. I did a lot of reading and research and had some fun doing it, joining a chapter of the League of Utah Writers and starting with others a critiquing group that I have kept up for twenty plus years. I titled the resulting novel *Time for All Eternity* and self-published it.
It was news to me both that Woodruff married after the Manifesto, as well as John Taylor was approached about a manifesto. It was interesting to learn that.
I definitely struggle with polygamy. It is the hardest thing for me to reconcile.
“as far as we know, there’s pretty good evidence that [Woodruff] took a plural wife seven years after the Manifesto” — Anyone care to explain what that “pretty good evidence is?
There’s a post at BCC that says Woodruff married Madame Mountford in 1897.
https://bycommonconsent.com/2004/11/05/madame-lydia-mary-olive-mamreov-von-finkelstein-mountford-and-interpreting-the-past/
Marriage is an earthly, time limited relationship that everyone wants to last forever, and polygamy is the result of patriarchy extending that relationship into a hypothetical eternity. It’s fine if you believe in eternal marriage, but it brings with it all the problems of family law with an eternal time frame.
To illustrate, here is an honest, but somewhat rhetorical question: in the Mormon concept of the celestial kingdom, is there such thing as divorce?
I certainly never thought so.
Trying to put the pieces together, then… If divorce does not exist in the CK, but marriage does (and is required!), I must conclude that either there would be an exactly equal number of exalted males and females (seems unlikely) or that there would be more exalted females (hence polygyny), or that anyone can be sealed to anyone (polygamy). The last case seems most consistent with church history.
Then consider all the complicated earth situations… if the father of a BIC one year old baby dies, and the mother remarries, the baby is sealed to the Father she doesn’t know instead of the one that raised her. It’s not fair to the dead father to change the sealing, but the church won’t allow the mom to be sealed to the new husband because Polyandry.
I have always had trouble making sense of it, and as a result “eternal marriage” never seemed very real to me.
The concept of polygamy didn’t bother me much until I got married and found out that my DW would not want me to remarry in the temple if she died first. It woke me up to the unfairness of the situation, which my privilege had blinded me from seeing.
I think it was the Reed Smoot hearings were the final straw for polygamy. If I recall correctly, Smoot was exasperated with church leadership.
Rockwell – Your scenario with the child gets even more complex if the woman remarries civilly and has children with the second husband. Those children in the CK are the children of her dead husband. And it isn’t just a ‘what if’ story. There are plenty of women, widowed young, in the exact situation. Makes much more of a mess than anything.
I’m always perplexed by church lessons / talk that crow about how Mormons believe family relationships last after death. So does everyone else (less the atheists, of course).
Rockwell, In some versions of Mormonism there are more men than women in the CK. If marriage is required, then polyandry, not polygamy. See http://mormonpolygamydocuments.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/JS0143.pdf 🙂
That post-manifesto polygamy happened is a well-documented but often veiled fact of LDS church history. That tens of thousands of people who consider Joseph Smith their founder and themselves heirs to his legacy and still practice polygamy today is impossible to deny.
The interesting question for me is when did the so-called mainstream LDS church actually STOP practicing polygamy? Or when did the Manifesto go from being a sham to being real?
Possible bench mark: Who was the last apostle to take a plural wife?
My uncle (afflicted with severe PTSD from WWII) worked as a caretaker at the temple and was seeped in the folklore surrounding it but also prone to tall-tales, pranks and confusion.
He told me when I was a young teenager to remember for all of my life the fact that apostle Richard Lyman (who was a family friend) married his second wife in a secret ceremony in the Logan temple in 1925. He told me the name of the church leader who performed the ceremony but I can’t remember it. I do clearly remember he mentioned this leader was, “you know the cowboy apostle.” He also told me another truly frightening story about being chased around the temple at night by a large Nephite with a sword.
Years later I learned this was the nickname for Anthony Ivins who would have been in the First Presidency in 1925. (There might have been more than 1 cowboy apostle. David O McKay and his famous ranch comes to mind- but I would have remembered his name since he was the President of the church at the time). Apostle Richard Lyman was excommunicated in 1943 for polygamy and publicly humiliated. I personally believe this was more of a political stunt by the conservatives in church leadership sending a message to the progressives in the leadership. His second marriage was no great discovery but a open secret for decades. Both of the wives have eaten with him at my grandparents kitchen table (which I currently own). They didn’t ax the plural wives either, the picture of one of them might hang in your church building today (Amy Brown Lyman) because she was the President of the Relief Society for the whole church and they didn’t even bother to release her. Lyman was later rebaptized but not restored to the office of apostle. His “full priesthood blessings” were restored posthumously (that would be his second anointing or “calling and election made sure” and his sealing to his second wife). Go figure.
*****
Pure speculation: Put on your hip boots, boys and girls.
George Albert Smith. No historical evidence exists that he ever took a second wife. None . Zilch. His first marriage was to Lucy Woodruff daughter of the 4th President of the church in 1892. His father, John Henry Smith was in the first Presidency. But the circumstantial evidence is there if you look for it. During the time he was moving up in the church, post-manifesto polygamy was often required for promotion and he moved up mighty fast- Apostle by 1903 at age 33. That would be a year before the Second Manifesto. His father was one of the strongest advocates of the practice of post-manifesto polygamy at the time. Today it seems ridiculous, but if you put yourself back in that time it seems unlikely to me he would NOT have secretly taken another wife. But who? And when? Will any descendants eventually materialize ?
David O McKay. Now his father was one of the few bishops in the church in the late 1800’s who refused to take a plural wife. President McKay was one of the few leaders of his time who was squeaky clean on the issue of polygamy in the eyes of the American public. I concede that this sounds completely ridiculous. But there was the strange relationship he had with his personal secretary, Miss Clare Middlemiss who never married and devoted about 18-20 hours a day, 7 days a week working for him for most of her life. She might have been the most influential woman ever in LDS church hierarchy. She controlled access to the prophet and functioned as his chief of staff and was quietly consulted on complex questions and had more clout than any of the apostles. My mother was a secretary who worked under Miss Middlemiss and there were rumors, impossible to substantiate, that they were secretly married. Except they really didn’t believe the rumors themselves. I doubt there was a sexual component to their relationship, but at another level there was an intimacy in the relationship between them that most plural wives would envy. McKay was born only three years after George Albert Smith and Richard Lyman.
Gordon B. Hinckley and Shery Dew. All right. All right. That is getting completely ridiculous.
I leave it to others to speculate about all the other general authorities of that time and their secret wives. Part of transparency is complete transparency- not just little windows of it when forced. Much of this secret history has probably been lost.
Question 5: What do you think about polygamy in general?
I can’t overcome why – if the LDS church is “true” – why God would implement polygamy knowing it was going to be a disaster for His church in the future? I mean how many millions more people might join the church if our history wasn’t so ****ed up… Corollary question is why couldn’t prophets see what a disaster it would be for future generations?
Related note – I haven’t seen much discussion about LDS lost boys like what we hear about in the FLDS church. Were there not enough polygamous marriages to produce large numbers of lost boys?
Plural marriage of any kind creates part time spouses with full time neglect. Current widowed men who’ve been sealed to second wives are full time husbands to the current wife, as they were to the first wife who died. But in the hereafter they of necessity become part time husbands to those wives, for whatever time they spend with one wife is robbed from the other. Each wife must do without while the husband never suffers from neglect. This situation in and of itself cannot be deemed righteous, nor holy. Perhaps some plural wives feel they have all they want of their husband and don’t desire any more from him and are relieved there are others to fill his needs. In such cases they aren’t equally yoked and I wonder if they met someone they were more equally yoked with if they’d better be able to become one and find much greater joy than they currently have—not that they aren’t satisfied and happy now, but how much more could they be?
Seems to me that temple sealings bind folks into the Family of God forever if they live worthy of that sealing. Such folks make it to the Celestial Kingdom, which has three levels. Once there (the CK) we associate as families. Some say women are more righteous than men so there will be billions of women there without their unrighteousness mortal hubbies, so the few good men of the CK are “given” these women as wives (and a reward for righteousness, they taught) in order that these women can progress to the highest exalted level which requires marriage. Wives who do not wish to allow these sisters to be given to their husbands are selfish and therefore not worthy of their husbands after all, so they have to stay in the lower CK and become servants (according to prophetic latter-day teachings) to their husbands and his wives.
Glory, what a horrible eternal plan for women.
What if we get there and all plural wives are now safely in the Family of God and can go find their one true love—say a young man who died in war and accepted the gospel in the Spirit world, or one who died of disease, starvation, abuse, neglect? I’m sure no righteous man would be so selfish as to hold onto plural wives who deserve to have a full time husband of their own. All children who grow up to live worthy to go to the CK are safely there with their parents, no matter who their parents end up with. Children have their one true loves to be with forever, so truly, all is well. No parent is without children they love, no one is “given” to anyone, everyone is with a spouse they adore, and no one is a “lesser-than servant”—everyone serves everyone, but God most of all.
Glory, in such a place all would be well. And whole. And complete. And full of JOY!
Mike,
Please don’t comment any more. You seem to relish throwing church leaders reputations under the bus. While I and others will criticize leaders when appropriate, we don’t make sh** up and pretend to call it “speculation.” Really you disgust me. We don’t want to hear any more of your conspiracy theories that denigrate church leaders. Please launch personal attacks against church leaders somewhere else. It is not at all welcome here, and if it is done again, I will move to block you from commenting. Your wild speculations are beyond good taste and your commenting here is no longer welcome.
Toad – Here’s how I reconcile your questions. Granted, this isn’t much of a reconciliation because it only makes it more difficult to remain a Mormon. I do not believe that God implemented polygamy. Plain and simple. It’s not of God and it’s not an eternal principle. Does that mean that Joseph Smith made a critical flaw? One that was continued on for generations? Yup. What does that mean for us today in terms of the doctrines, policies, and procedures that are put in place by the church? Well, it means that I only permit into my belief system those things that I feel like God has given me a personal witness of. I have had to reject several things coming down from Salt Lake City over the last few years on that basis.
I get so tired of apostates who reject what God reveals to the prophets. Apostates have recently been pushing the idea that lawyers wrote the Proclamation on the Family, and well-meaning Church members have been duped into believing it. Apostates actually began making the claim back in 2014.
The truth is that President Hinckley first read “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” at the General Relief Society Meeting in September 1995 (“Stand Strong against the Wiles of the World,” Ensign, November 1995).
In 1997, the Church included the text of the Proclamation in an amicus brief to petition the Hawaii supreme court to reject same sex marriage. The Church, like anyone else, is going to use lawyers when petitioning the court. Apostates have seized on this to claim that lawyers wrote the Proclamation on the Family.
When President Hinckley read the Proclamation back in 1995, he stated that it was a “reaffirmation of standards, doctrines, and practices relative to the family which the prophets, seers, and revelators of this church have repeatedly stated throughout its history,” which means everything in the Proclamation had already been revealed to the prophets leading the Church and all of it had been “repeatedly stated throughout its history.”
There was obviously no new doctrine in the Proclamation on the Family, and lawyers did not write the Proclamation.
Polygamy is only an issue if you dogmatically assume that the creative aspect of marital relations between exalted being ONLY consists of sexual procreation.
1) yes, I think the manifesto was a sham. My family was part of the post-manifesto marriages outside of US territory. Mike Quinn’s Work that got him xed is powerful.
2) yes, I’ve been aware of Taylor’s revelation (and the critiques of its authenticity) since I began reading Ogden krauts Work many years ago
3) I believe in polygamy the same way I believe in gay marriage. I believe sealing is an eternal necessity. I don’t believe we actually know much about the society of god.
4) see my first comment.