The Mormon Menace: The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite. John Doyle Lee
are here reprinted as The Mormon Menace. Much that was shocking and atrocious has been eliminated in the editing, as unfit for modest ears and eyes. What remains, however, will give a sufficient picture of the Mormon Church in its hateful attitude towards all that is moral or republican among our people. A black kitten makes a black cat; what the Mormon Church was under President Young it is under President Smith, and will be with their dark successors.
The purpose of the present publication of Lee's story is to warn American men, and more particularly American women, of the Mormon viper still coiled upon the national hearth. To-day, as in the days of Lee, the Mormon missionary is abroad in the world. He is in your midst; he makes his converts among your neighbors; within the month, on one detected occasion, he stood at the portals of your public schools and gave his insidious pamphlets, preaching Mormonism, into the hands of your children.
More, the Mormon Church has, in addition to its religious, its political side, and teaches not only immorality, but treason. On a far-away 5th of November a certain darksome Guy Fawkes and his confederates, all with a genius for explosives, planned to blow up the British Government by blowing up its parliament, and went some distance towards carrying out their plot. The Mormon Church of Latter-day Saints, with headquarters in Salt Lake City, is employed upon a present and somewhat similar conspiracy against this Government, with Senator Smoot as the advance guard or agent thereof in the halls of our national legislature.
As this is written, a Senate inquiry into this conspiracy wags slowly yet searchingly forward. Stripped of formality of phrase and reset in easier English, the question which the Senate Committee is trying to solve is this: Is the Mormon Church in conspiracy against the Government, with Senator Smoot's seat as a first fruit of that conspiracy? As corollary comes the second query: To which does Senator Smoot give primary allegiance, the Church or the nation?
By every sign and signal smoke of evidence the conspiracy charged exists, with President Smith of the Mormon Church its chief architect and expositor. Smoot takes his seat in the upper house of Congress with a first purpose of carrying forth, so far as lies within his hands, the plans of the conspirators. What is the purpose of the conspirators? To protect themselves and their fellow Mormons in the criminal practice of polygamy, and prevent their prosecution as bigamists by the Utah courts.
The inquiry has already uncovered Mormonism in many of its evil details, and retold most, if not all, of those stories of pious charlatanism and religious crime which, during seventy-five years of its existence, make up the annals of the Mormon Church. As a first proposal it was explained in evidence before the committee that in no sort had the Mormon Church abated or abandoned polygamy as either a tenet or a practice. Indeed, the present conspiracy aims to produce conditions in Utah under which polygamy may flourish safe from the ax of law. In the old days, when Brigham Young ruled, the Mormons were safe with sundry thousands of desert miles between the law and them. Then they feared nothing save strife within the Church, and that would be no mighty peril. Brigham Young would put it down with the Danites. He had his Destroying Angels, himself at their head, and when a man rebelled he was murdered.
Mormonism is not, when a first fanaticism has subsided, a religion that would address the popular taste. It is a religion of gloom, of bitterness, of fear, of iron hand to punish the recalcitrant. It demands slavish submission on the part of every man. It insists upon abjection, self-effacement, a surrender of individuality on the part of every woman. The man is to work and obey; the woman is to submit and bear children; all are to be for the Church, of the Church, by the Church, hoping nothing, fearing nothing, knowing nothing beyond the will of the Church. The money price of Mormonism is a tithe of the member's income - the Church takes a tenth. The member may pay in money or in kind; he may sell and pay his tenth in dollars, or he may bring to the tithing yard his butter, or eggs, or hay, or wheat, or whatever he shall raise as the harvest of his labors.
In the old time the President of the Church was the temporal as well as spiritual head. No one might doubt his "revelations" or dispute his commands without being visited with punishment which ran from a fine to the death penalty. When outsiders invaded their regions the Mormons, by command of Brigham Young, struck them down, as in the Mountain Meadows murders. This was in the day when the arm of national power was too short to reach them. Now, when it can reach them, the Church conspires where before it assassinated, and strives to do by chicane what it aforetime did by shedding blood. And all to defend itself in the practice of polygamy!
One would ask why the Mormons set such extravagant store by that doctrine of many wives. This is the great reason: It serves to mark the Church members and separate and set them apart from Gentile influences. Mormonism is the sort of religion that children would renounce, and converts, when their heat had cooled, abandon. The women would leave it on grounds of jealousy and sentiment; the men would quit in a spirit of independence and a want of superstitious belief in the Prophet's "revelations." Polygamy prevents this. It shuts the door of Gentile sympathy against the Mormon. The Mormon women are beings disgraced among the Gentiles; they must defend their good repute. The children of polygamous marriages must defend polygamy to defend their own legitimacy. The practice, which doubtless had its beginning solely to produce as rapidly as might be a Church strength, now acts as a bar to the member's escape; wherefore the President, his two counselors, the twelve apostles and others at the head of Mormon affairs, insist upon it as a best, if not an only, Church protection. Without polygamy the Mormon membership would dwindle until Mormonism had utterly died out. The Mormon heads think so, and preserve polygamy as a means of preserving the Church.
What the Mormon leaders think and feel and say on this keynote question of polygamy, however much they may seek to hide their sentiments behind a mask of lies, may be found in former utterances from the Church pulpit, made before the shadow of the law had fallen across it.
President Heber C. Kimball, in a discourse delivered in the Tabernacle, November 9, 1856 (Deseret News, volume 6, page 291), said: "I have no wife or child that has any right to rebel against me. If they violate my laws and rebel against me, they will get into trouble just as quickly as though they transgressed the counsels and teachings of Brother Brigham. Does it give a woman a right to sin against me because she is my wife? No; but it is her duty to do my will as I do the will of my Father and my God. It is the duty of a woman to be obedient to her husband, and unless she is I would not give a damn for all her queenly right and authority, nor for her either, if she will quarrel and lie about the work of God and the principles of plurality. A disregard of plain and correct teachings is the reason why so many are dead and damned, and twice plucked up by the roots, and I would as soon baptize the devil as some of you."
October 6, 1855 (volume 5, page 274), Kimball said: "If you oppose any of the works of God you will cultivate a spirit of apostasy. If you oppose what is called the spiritual wife doctrine, the patriarchal order, which is of God, that course will corrode you with apostasy, and you will go overboard. The principle of plurality of wives never will be done away, although some sisters have had revelations that when this time passes away, and they go through the vale, every woman will have a husband to herself. I wish more of our young men would take to themselves wives of the daughters of Zion, and not wait for us old men to take them all. Go ahead upon the right principle, young gentlemen, and God bless you for ever and ever, and make you fruitful, that we may fill the mountains and then the earth with righteous inhabitants."
President Heber C. Kimball, in a lengthy discourse delivered in the Tabernacle on the 4th day of April, 1857, took occasion to say: "I would not be afraid to promise a man who is sixty years of age, if he will take the counsel of Brother Brigham and his brethren, that he will renew his youth. I have noticed that a man who has but one wife, and is inclined to that doctrine, soon begins to wither and dry up, while a man who goes into plurality looks fresh, young, and sprightly. Why is this? Because God loves that man, and because he honors his work and word. Some of you may not believe this - I not only believe it, but I also know it. For a man of God to be confined to one woman is a small business; it is as much as we can do to keep up under the burdens we have to carry, and I do not know what we should do if we only had one woman apiece."
President Heber C. Kimball used the following language in a discourse, instructing a band of missionaries about to start on their mission: "I say to those who are elected to go on missions, Go, if you never return, and commit what you