Mormons and Polygamy

Every schoolboy knows that the Mormons (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) used to practice "celestial marriage," better known as polygamy. Last summer sombre Idaho Novelist Vardis Fisher, no Mormon himself though of pioneer Mormon stock, won the $7,500 Harper Prize Novel Contest with Children of God, a 769-page epic of Mormons and their two famed leaders, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Author Fisher told in lusty detail of Prophet Smith's plural marriages before his lynching by a mob at Carthage, Ill., in 1844. To Reorganized Mormons, who believe that Joseph Smith neither practiced nor preached polygamy, the book was a plural pain.

Not to be confused with Mormonism proper is Reorganized Mormonism. After Founder Smith's death, most Mormons followed Brigham Young on a 1,500-mile trek to the Promised Land of Utah. There in 1852 Prophet Young publicly proclaimed polygamy as a divine doctrine which, he said, Founder Smith and a chosen few had secretly initiated a decade before.

But none of Joseph Smith's children followed Young or was ever a polygamist. The Mormons who stayed in the Middle West set up the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints at Independence, Mo., chose Founder Smith's son Joseph as their president. When he died, he was in turn succeeded by his son, Frederick Madison Smith. The Reorganized Mormons claim that Young's attribution of polygamy to Joseph Smith was a base libel. Emma Hale, say they, was the prophet's first and only wife, even though the Dictionary of American Biography credits him with 27.

Last fortnight 3,000 Reorganized Mormon delegates met for biennial conference at Independence, fumed over Vardis Fisher's book. Said goateed President Frederick Smith: "This book is of the same type that besmirched Washington and Lincoln." Everyone laughed when another grandson, Lawyer Israel A. Smith, reported that in the genealogical records of the rival Mormon branch he had found his grandfather listed with the women who had been "sealed to him in celestial marriage" in Salt Lake City. "Joseph Smith," said he, "met his death before Salt Lake City was founded. But it was a real thrill to pull grandmas out of a filing cabinet."

Last week the Reorganized Mormons, still seething, decided to bring libel suits against Novelist Fisher and his publishers. Author Fisher was unperturbed. "Joseph Smith has been called epileptic, fraud, drunkard, thief, libertine and murderer," said he. "I have made him a great and lovable man and not an impostor. . . ." He added that a round dozen people had written him that they had been converted to Mormonism by reading his novel.

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