BY DARYL JAMES
JANUARY 2002
     Critics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints offer many books on Mormon polygamy. It's one of their favorite topics. They highlight the more salacious and outrageous facts and omit other relevant information. They write without an understanding of revealed religion, and in the end their real interest is not in history -- but in portraying the Church and its early leaders in a false light.
     The books reviewed here, however, are samples of biographies, academic studies and histories that contain worthwhile information for family historians interested in the lives of their 19th century ancestors.

CONTENTS
Life of John Taylor
Life of Joseph F. Smith
Mormon Polygamous Families: Life in the Principle
Mormon Polygamy: A History
Mormons in Mexico

"Life of John Taylor: Collector's Edition"
B.H. Roberts
Bookcraft Publishers; Salt Lake City
499 pages; $10.25

     Historians often credit Mohandas K. Gandhi with being the first man to lead a large-scale, nonviolent campaign of civil disobedience. However, in the century before Gandhi's ministry in South Africa and India, President John Taylor led a miraculous campaign of nonviolence in the United States against anti-polygamy laws. At a time in Utah when federal marshals were surrounding homes in the night and storming into bedrooms looking for suspects accused of "unlawful cohabitation," President Taylor kept the Church calm.
     All the government might have needed as an excuse to launch a massacre of the Mormons during this period of increasing tension would have been a single act of retaliation anywhere in the Mormon territories. But no federal official was ever harmed. Even when a deputy shot and killed polygamist Edward M. Dalton on Dec. 16, 1886, in front of witnesses in a Parowan street, President Taylor prevented any violent retaliation.
     B.H. Roberts does an excellent job in this book of laying out the history of polygamy and documenting President Taylor's central role in the showdown with the federal government in the 1870s and 1880s. He also shows President Taylor as tender husband and father, a devout Christian, a passionate orator and writer, and a true friend of Brigham Young and Joseph Smith.

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"Life of Joseph F. Smith"
Joseph Fielding Smith
The Deseret News Press; Salt Lake City
(1938) 490 pages

     Joseph F. Smith's mother, Mary Fielding, embraced the doctrine of plural marriage when it was preached to her by her husband, assistant Church president Hyrum Smith. Later, after her husband was killed with the Prophet at Carthage Jail, she led her family, including the boy Joseph F. Smith, in a company of Saints crossing the plains to Utah. Thanks to her perseverence alone, the Smith line remained linked to the Church and Joseph F. Smith was enabled to follow in the footsteps of his father and uncle.
     Even before adulthood, Joseph F. Smith began his career in Church service by touring Hawaii on a mission. As a young apostle, Joseph F. Smith became a staunch defender of plural marriage, as his parents had done before him.
     Then, as president, Joseph F. Smith guided the Church through the final portion of its transitional period away from polygamy toward mainstream America. He testified in Washington in the Reed Smoot hearings and clarified the Church's position on polygamy with the "Second Manifesto" of 1904.
     Thus, Joseph F. Smith demonstrated a remarkable ability to bend his will to the Lord's. He understood the principle his uncle the Prophet had taught: What is right under one set of circumstances may be wrong under another. He let go of polygamy when its continued practice was no longer right.
     Life of Joseph F. Smith is a well-told story by Joseph Fielding Smith, who writes not only as a Church historian but as a son.

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"Mormon Polygamous Families: Life in the Principle"
Publications in Mormon Studies series
Jessie L. Embry
University of Utah Press; Salt Lake City
(1987) 238 pages

     Embry offers a detailed and interesting overview of Mormon polygamy that focuses on the principle's impact on the average member of the church. She reports on dozens of interviews with the children and grandchildren of Mormon polygamists and offers many case studies and anecdotes. Mixed in with these accounts, she offers statistics from various academic studies.
     The book is ideal for family historians trying to reconstruct what daily life was like for members of the Church living the principle of plural marriage in the 19th and 20th centuries. The author explores relationships among wives, living arrangements and visiting patterns, and daily life and family roles, among other topics. She also compares Mormon polygamy to polygamy in other cultures and religions.

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"Mormon Polygamy: A History"
Richard S. Van Wagoner
Signature Books, Inc.; Salt Lake City
(1989) 255 pages; $12.95

     Van Wagoner offers a worldly look at a spiritual topic. Working from the premise that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints started in 1830 as a social and religious experiment, the author creates a history that renders God irrelevant. In the book, LDS polygamy begins as an invention of Joseph Smith, whom the author claims is influenced by his “exposure to utopian thought and practices” of the day.
     The author gives equal weight to official Church accounts and to contradictory reports from a variety of sources, including second- and third-hand witnesses, enemies of the Church and disgruntled former members. The author draws heavily, for example, from the writings of John C. Bennett, a former member of the Church who acknowledged a desire to destroy the Prophet and who lobbied to have Joseph Smith extradited to Missouri to face charges in the attempted murder of Gov. Lilburn Boggs - charges that Bennett knew lacked merit. Often, the author reports facts correctly but casts the Prophet and those loyal to him in a false light. For example, in the matter regarding Eliza R. Snow and her rivalry with Emma Hale Smith, the author fails to mention Eliza’s own account of events. The book wins praise from selected critics for its “candor” and “refreshing detachment,” but this critic detects a bias in the book toward the sensational.
     Nevertheless, the book cites many interesting sources and contains certain chapters that may be helpful to family historians studying the years of polygamy in the Church.

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"Mormons in Mexico: The Dynamics of Faith and Culture"
F. LaMond Tullis
Utah State University Press; Logan, Utah
(1987) 250 pages; $22.50

     The main focus on Tullis' book is on the presence of the LDS Church in Mexico and its relationship with the Mexican people, not on polygamy. Yet Tullis documents how anti-polygamy sentiment in the United States sped up the Church's plans to form settlements in northern Mexico as havens from federal marshals in Utah and Arizona. By 1885 thousands of Mormon polygamists, including Joseph Henry James and his three wives, were lined up along the Mexico-United States border awaiting word from Church officials that arrangements had been completed for the pioneers to proceed south of the Border. Before this time, the Church's interest in Mexico had primarily been in preaching to the descendants of Lehi still living there. Polygamy forced this desire to proselytize to become secondary for a period of time out of necessity.

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