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Lately I have been subscribing to the Salt Lake Tribune polygamy RSS feed. It really is fascinating. They’ve had a lot of material on the capture of polygamist leader Warren Jeffs and his arrest for rape for participating in the arranged marriages of underage girls (he’s not charged with physical assault but with arranging the marriages). |
I decided to pick up a book on the history of the Short Creek polygamists (the community that Jeffs leads). The twin cities are now called Colorado City and Hildale, but for most of their history were known as Short Creek.
The book I chose is “Kidnapped from that Land”. It is a sympathetic history both of polygamy’s role in the Mormon church as well as the history of Short Creek, in particular the raid of 1944 in which all members of the community were removed – the men arrested for “cohabitation,” the women and children placed in foster care in the cities with “good” Mormons.
The author is neither an historian nor a sociologist, neither is she a polygamist although she hails from polygamist stock. The book contains a great deal of church history, fascinating if you’ve never read it, and an enlightening history on the persecution of polygamists by the federal government, the states of Utah and Arizona, and the Mormon church.
In short, the official Mormom church broke with polygamy in 1890 so they could obtain statehood but fed polygamy, including endorsing polygamist marriages, for another 20 years. After that time the official church grew more and more opposed to polygamy until finally they adopted a code of silence in an attempt to distance themselves from it. Fat chance.
The polygamists, or Fundamentalists, continued to grow, mainly due to a very high birth rate. The town of Short Creek Utah/Arizona became a place to try to lead a polygamist life in peace in the twenties and thirties but in 1944 the State of Arizona raided the town and emptied it, determined to purge the polygamists from their midst. The State of Utah, cowed by its own attempted raid on a different polygamist group several years earlier, stayed out of the mess.
Raids on polygamists – complete with cartoons depicting the state officials holding up children in front of their parents and demanding they sign pledges that they won’t discuss their religion with their children in order to get them back – tend to backfire in public opinion.
I give the book 3 yaddas out of 5. Good material and well presented but the author does not appear to be a classically trained historian or sociologist, just a good Mormon interested in her own history.
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