How did you become interested in your area (s) of expertise/specialization?

Like many investigations, my dissertation work began as frustration with the way things were done at the lab where I was performing repetitive tasks for my advisor. My job consisted of shepherding dozens of hardware benchmarking tasks through the queues at major supercomputer centers across the country. Supercomputers typically have heavy demand and support the work of hundreds or thousands of different scientists, all vying for shares of the resource. I often felt the systems for scheduling jobs at these centers were opaque, unpredictable and unresponsive. I spent the next 6 years devising ways to fix those problems.

Scheduling is a fun area to work in, because it reaches into such a variety of questions and modes of inquiry. Part of it is pure theory, for which I have great aesthetic love. Part of it is trying to understand the people involved—administrators, users, funding agencies. A particular problem other researchers had long bemoaned was that information users provide to schedulers is generally terribly inaccurate. Are users motivated to be deceptive in their interaction with schedulers? Are they just lazy, or uninformed? Nobody had ever just asked them about why their input was so inaccurate, so we did. Then all these findings need to be integrated into designing a solution, an applied algorithms problem. In other words, in what ways can schedulers be redesigned to gently improve user behavior, and be more responsive to users? It’s not every Computer Scientist who gets to spend part of her day fondly recalling her study of Literature in asking, “Are users inherently good or evil?” and then the rest of the day reading Garey and Johnson [1].

What are you currently studying, or what are some of your current projects (papers, books, dissertations, etc.)?

My most recent research projects have been in Computer Science pedagogy. I successfully redesigned the Theory of Computability course at UCSD to use Peer Instruction. In Peer Instruction classes, each lecture slide is just a multiple choice question, and students learn by working through the questions themselves and in small groups. The instructor is there to provide the mise en scène, to direct and respond to the discussion, but allows students to do most of the acting. To help the instructor know when and how students need instructor guidance, students use wireless “clicker” devices that communicate with the instructor’s laptop.

Peer Instruction was popularized in post-secondary Physics education by Harvard Physics Professor Eric Mazur some ten years ago, but there are only and handful of researchers/practitioners exploring its use in Computer Science. My most recent work reports on use of Peer Instruction in a Theory of Computation course, to induce students to use proof arguments as a natural part of arguing amongst themselves about the right answers.

What has your experience been like as a woman in the academy?

Computer Science is notoriously lacking in women. While women earn a majority of all undergraduate degrees, and have made enormous gains in Law, Medicine, and other fields, Computer Science has not only failed to see similar improvements, but has actually gone in reverse. In 2009, women comprised just 11.3% of those graduating with bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science, down from 30-40% in the mid-1980’s [2]. This can make for a challenging environment at times, and I feel a duty to devote a certain amount of my time to outreach, retention and women’s issues advocacy. But typically, when I am working, I am not aware of being a “woman in the academy.” I’m just a scholar like any other.

One thing that allowed me to set aside concerns about my minority status was my good fortune in having an exceptionally supportive advisor. His inexhaustible patience and encouragement were vital to my continued success after the birth of my twins during my third year of graduate work. I’ve seen some women smoothly handle a birth or even two during the graduate years, but a complicated pregnancy followed by caring for two colicky newborns made it very difficult for me. I used to joke that I was the only grad student in the department who found working in the lab on my dissertation to be the relaxing part of my day.

Being a woman in the academy has benefits for mothers: schedule flexibility, extended leave of absence policies, ability to work from home, and other accommodations. My children love their occasional visits to campus with me–seeing the interesting architecture and sculptures, and eating at their favorite campus food court spot. They’ve even accompanied me on travel to present a conference paper. (n.b.: Flying alone with 18 month old twins wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had. But they had fun with Grandma at the resort.) I am proud of the example I’m setting for them, and I think my experiences and opportunities have often been enriching for them.

Who are some people (living or dead) in your field you admire? Why?
I’m very pleased to be able to say that I have lunched with Fran Allen [3], the first female recipient of the Turing Award (like the Nobel, for Computer Scientists). Allen had a long and distinguished career in compiler research at IBM, where she was named an IBM Fellow, complete with certificate recognizing the recipient for “his accomplishments.” Allen obviously had to be very focused on her work to achieve so much, and during years when she was such a lone trailblazer. So I have particular admiration for the time and care she takes in fostering community amongst women in the field, and reaching out to younger women just getting started (e.g., having lunch with all the female graduate students in our department).

Speaking of the Turing Award, another person I admire is Alan Turing, known as the Father of Modern Computing. He was an extraordinary genius, known for his exceptionally imaginative theoretical work and proofs. Among his accomplishments: he was on the team that cracked the Germans’ Enigma code during WWII and was thus instrumental the Allied victory, he conceived the basic design that all computers use to this day, he proved there are mathematical problems no computer could ever solve, and he formulated a theory of Artificial Intelligence that lives on today as a $1million prize for a computer that can pass the Turing Test. Tragically, we lost Turing at just 41 years old. He committed suicide after being criminally prosecuted for homosexuality and forced to undergo chemical “treatments.” In 2009, the British government formally apologized for its treatment of Turing. I think this is an important story to tell, as a reminder of the senseless and bitter fruits of hate.

For someone who is interested in studying what you do, what are some books you would recommend on the subject?

For inspiration I recommend:

• Christine Alvarado’s chapter of Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, edited by Sherry Turkle (MIT Press, 2008). Alvarado describes how, as a child, she first explored mathematical and computing concepts such as recursion, exponents and divisibility by braiding the hair of her My Little Pony.
• The Cuckoo’s Egg, by Cliff Stoll (Doubleday, 1989), was the first book I read about computers, and what sparked my fascination with wanting to be the kind of omniscient computer wizard people looked to for help deciphering them.

Right now most of what I’m reading is related to Theory of Computation, since that is what I’m teaching. While there are many fascinating reads on theory, this one is peerless and surprisingly accessible:

• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter (Basic Books, 1979).

How might a better understanding of your field and/or research help a scholar of Mormonism?

There are often interesting computer science angles to the work the church does. Whether it be the recent revamping of the Family Search genealogy software, the mechanics of streaming general conference over the internet, the church’s search engine optimization efforts, the church’s ambitious social media projects, or fantasizing about a better software system for ward membership and financial clerks. Then there was the time I somehow connected Set Theory and Universal Turing Machines to a feminist dissection of gender discourse in General Conference.

–––––––

[1] Garey, M. R. and D. S. Johnson. Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness (W. H. Freeman, 1979).

[2] 2008-2009 Taulbee Survey

[3] Speaking of enriching experiences for my children that are available in connection with my work, they were also there at the lunch with Fran Allen.

Education

BA – Spanish with a minor in sociology from BYU

MA – Modern Language (Spanish) – Texas A & M University

Ph.D. – Curriculum and Instruction – Louisiana State University

How did you become interested in your area (s) of expertise/specialization?

After an absurdly terrible student teaching experience in Orem and West Jordan, UT, I vowed never to teach a day in my life.  Then reality set in and I needed a job, so I decided to give teaching one more shot, hoping that if I could set up my classroom the way I wanted it (as opposed to the way my student teaching “mentors” wanted it), then I might like it.  So I did and I loved it.  I loved the subject area (Spanish) and my high school kids.  They were aggravating, energetic, myopic, winsome, egocentric, and funny (so funny).  I laughed more as a high school teacher than probably ever before—and that’s saying something because I laugh a lot!  I enjoyed teaching high school, but moved on after I had my second daughter because I foolishly thought I would try my hand at being a full-time stay-at-home-mom (ah, the naivete of youth!) and because I wanted something more flexible.

I taught Spanish at LSU for three years.  Being an instructor at a university was great in many ways.  I probably worked 25 hours a week, which was perfect as I was juggling my job with an infant and a toddler.  It stretched my knowledge and skills, which can be both enjoyable and painful.  It was also really crummy in other ways.  Instructors were never asked what we wanted to teach and were not allowed to teach anything other than the first 3 Spanish courses in the sequence.  The tenured (or tenure-track) faculty didn’t even bother to learn the names of the instructors and adjuncts.  I started to get the sense that second-class citizenship would wear on me after a while.

Geography dictated my choices at that point. Because my husband was a faculty member at LSU and because we were happy there, LSU was the only option I considered.  So I gave birth to our third child in February and started the Ph.D. program in June.  Thanks to a lot of help from my husband, a lot of work on my part, and an unknown amount of luck, I completed a Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction in 2008.  I ended up settling on a dissertation topic that merged all my interests:  a case study of a Spanish/French foreign language immersion magnet program that was all wrapped up in school desegregation efforts and school choice.

What are you currently studying, or what are some of your current projects (papers, books, dissertations, etc.)?

I’m in my third year as an assistant professor, so I am still working on milking my dissertation for all it’s worth (and then some?).  I have gotten a few publications in (not) competitive outlets, but since I’m at a teaching school, that’s okay.  This year, my goal is to re-tool my dissertation and get a book proposal out and see if I can get it picked up.

What has your experience been like as a woman in the academy?

Largely because of the discipline I am in (education), my experience as a woman in the academy has been great.  I have heard horror stories from women in the hard sciences, though.  For me, my research and teaching interests are very intertwined with my family life.  I have three little lab rats (ages 7, 10, and 14) who go out into the schools every day and report to me at the end of every day.  I share my kids’ experiences with my students every day, which I think helps them see that what we are doing in class is very pertinent and real—and it is.  Any of my students could graduate and become my son’s 6^th grade English teacher or my daughter’s 9^th grade algebra teacher.  So I take it very personally.

My children are welcome in my building.  Sometimes I bring them up to my office when they are sick and set them up with a blanket and a movie.  I have brought them to class with me as well.  That’s not my favorite thing to do (by a long shot), but I’ve done it because I had no other choice.  My 5 year old was once watching Shrek with headphones in the corner of our classroom.  My students were amused because although he wasn’t talking (which I had forbade him to do), he wasn’t stifling his laughter, so we kept hearing audible laughs from the back corner during the funny parts.

I am able to—within reason—request class days and times that work well with my kids’ schedule.  I am now teaching a couple of online classes, which gives me even more flexibility to work after the kids are in bed, etc.

In your field who are some women (living or dead) you admire? Why?

This is a tough question.  There are many people whose work I admire.  Here are a few:

Deborah Meier – Meier has done a lot of really good work in creating small schools in urban areas with low-income students that many others have dismissed or deemed to be “uneducable.”  Not only has she written about this topic, she was the principal of one such school (Mission Hill) for eight years.  She also writes an interesting weekly blog with Diane Ravitch in which they offer a point/counterpoint on current educational issues.  Both of them write in a very accessible, enjoyable way without sacrificing the meat of their opinions.

Annette Lareau – Lareau is a sociologist who focuses on the ways in which social stratification influences the educational process for children.  She has published numerous studies and several books that compare and contrast the ways in which low-income versus middle/higher-income families negotiate their children’s school experiences.  Her work is fascinating and eye-opening to me.

For someone who is interested in studying what you do, what are some books you would recommend on the subject?

• Jonathan Kozol – anything and everything!  His seminal work is probably Savage Inequalities.  I have read it several times.  It never fails to madden, disappoint, and sadden me.
• Deborah Meier – The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem and In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization (This is a great read!)
• Annette Lareau – Unequal Childhoods:  Class, Race, and Family Life and Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education
• Diane Ravitch – Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform and The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education
• David Labaree – Someone Has to Fail: The Zero Sum Game of Public Schooling (haven’t read this yet, but want to!)
• **Larry Cuban & Dorothy Shipps – Reconstructing the Common Good in Education: Coping with Intractable American Dilemmas
• Carl Bankston & Stephen Caldas – A Troubled Dream: The Promise and Failure of School Desegregation in Louisiana
• Kluger, Richard – Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality
• Levine, Ellen – Freedom’s Children: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories

1. A Selected Chronology
2. Meanings of “X has horns”
3. What Makes Horns Stick?
4. If Mormons Wanted to Shake Things Up They Should Have Grown Wings
5. The American Civil War
6. Colonialism and Functionalism
7. Miscellanea

Now, having slogged through all the academica, we finally arrive at the important question: Do Mormon doctrines of agency extend to horns? Can one choose or create their own  style? Are choices limited? to Old-Testament “clean” beasts? to terrestrials? And so on.

• 1/7: A Selected Chronology
• 2/7: Meanings of “X has horns”
• 3/7: What Makes Horns Stick?
• 4/7: If Mormons Wanted to Shake Things Up They Should Have Grown Wings
• 5/7: The American Civil War
• 6/7: Colonialism and Functionalism with Mormon Horns
• 7/7: Miscellanea

Early church leaders used and reported horn language. William W Phelps provided the earliest (that I know) in 1836: “I am satisfied that our appearance, if nothing had been said, would have been productive if good-men saw that we did not wear horns, or any other monstrous thing, to distinguish ourselves from others” (ht: Justin, SC Taysom, et alia). [1] Joseph, Hyrum, and William Smith also used or recorded conversations involving horns or horn metaphors. [2]

In 1843, Samuel Prior reported his disappointment at meeting Joseph Smith “when, instead of the heads and horns of the beast, and false prophet, I beheld only the appearance of a common man….” [3] Prior focused on facial expressions and countenance (see footnote), not cryptozoology and alluded to John the Revelator’s poly-horned beasts. [4]

About the same time, a Times and Seasons report mixed sociality and corporeality: “they perceived that the Mormons were affable, courteous, and intelligent; and in looking at our heads and feet they discovered that we had neither horns nor hoofs.” [5]

Mid-century provides examples from prominent to anonymous Mormons. Heber C Kimball claimed that “many emigrants who came through our valley, thought we were moose, camels, or dromedaries. They …no doubt thought we had horns on our heads…. I have been in the world, and they cannot think that we are human!” [6] So far as I know, Kimball stands alone in reporting Mormon moose-/camel-ness but he used an oft-repeated logic: “for X to act as they do toward Y they must think Y are Z, because if they thought them human, they would never act thus.” [7]

The 1860s and 70s optimistically shrank horns. For example, RF Burton claimed in 1862 that “people no longer wonder that [Mormon] missionaries do not show horns and cloven feet.” [8] An RLDS missionary named Blair reported, however, that the news had not yet reached Wisconsin. [9] As of the early 1880s, though, President Cannon reported that visitors came to Utah “expecting to see monsters, as though you [Mormons] wore horns or were beings of a different species.” [10] Others encountered surprise/confusion at Mormon hornlessness, no doubt aided and abetted by Mormons who blamed smooth craniums on youth. [11]

The “archetypical” Mormon-horns story made it into (text-searchable) print in 1893:

In 1863, some California emigrants were passing through this city. …with some astonishment the girl exclaimed, “Ma, where are the Mormons?” The lady answered, “Why, my dear, these people you see on the street are all Mormons.” With surprise the girl replied, “Why, papa said that the Mormons had horns on them!” [12]

By 1900 They-Believe-We-Have-Horns (TBWHH) had reached its mature form, penetrated Mormondom from child to prophet, and established itself in Brighamite and Josephite branches.

As noted, the horn posts continue earlier efforts analyzing ways of describing Mormons or using Mormons to describe something else. These include: India, Cows, Bluebeard, Lice, Crickets, Flies, Happy Valley, and sundry other beasts.

[2] In 1842 Dec Joseph Smith quoted General Wilson Law: “we had reason to think the Mormons were a peculiar people, different from other people, having horns or something of the kind; but I find they look like other people: indeed, I think Mr. Smith a very good-looking man.” [A] Note that even though Smith’s [and/or ghost-writer’s] narrative is in first person, the quote refers to Smith in third person rather than second. The word “peculiar” presents, of course, some difficulty. Presumably Law did not intend “peculiar” in the King James Bible’s sense of “special or chosen.” The present-day connotation of peculiar as weird had arisen by the nineteenth century but the KJV application of “peculiar” remained well known. [B]

At April conference in 1844, Hyrum defended a steam mill that had been the subject of “a great deal of bickering,” noting that “it has brought in thousands who would not have come here; but as they saw that the Mormons had got no horns, they came, and have got good by it.” [C] In a related metaphor, William complained that “some have thought… the city [Nauvoo] a barbarian—ugly, formal with head and horns, and stuck into the nethermost corner of the universe….” [D] I’m glossing “formal with” as “complete with.” The “head and horns” might reference some Barbarians’ war dress, which included horns and animal heads, or the “heads and horns” of the beast from Rev 13, which he had referenced earlier.

[A] Wilson Law, in conversation with Joseph Smith, Springfield, IL, 1842 Dec 31, as reported by Joseph Smith, HC 5:214. [B] For easily-multipliable example: “It does not mean…that they are to be a peculiar people in the sense that they are to be unlike others… but that they belong to the Saviour in contradistinction from belonging to themselves…..” Albert Barnes, comment for Titus 2:14, Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Epistles of Paul to the Thessalonians, to Timothy, to Titus, and to Philemon, vols 16-17 of Barnes’ Notes on the Old and New Testaments (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1850), 317. [C] Hyrum Smith, “Conference Minutes: Continuation of last April’s Conference,” Times and Seasons 5:14 (Nauvoo, IL: 1844 Aug 01): 597 [596-8], transcription by CenterPlace.org. [D] William Smith, Letter to the editor, 1844 Nov 10, Times and Seasons 5:24 (Nauvoo, IL: 1844 Jan 01): 756 [-757].

[3] Prior described himself as having “had the misfortune to live always among that class of people who look upon a Mormon as being of quite another race….” He went on: “I fancied that I should behold a countenance sad and sorrowful, yet containing the fiery marks of rage and exasperation—I supposed that I should be enabled to discover in him some of those thoughtful and reserved features, those mystic and sarcastic glances which I had fancied the ancient sages to possess. I expected to see that fearful faltering look of conscious shame, which, from what I had heard of him, he might be expected to evince. He appeared at last—but how was I disappointed… [portion quoted in text]” Samuel Prior, “A Visit to Nauvoo,” Times and Seasons 4:13 (1843 May 15): 196-8, transcription by CenterPlace.org.

[4] Rev 13:1-15, 16:12-13, and 19:19-21. Some contemporaries linked Mormonism to these same figures. “[Satan] has at hand a whole host of isms and schisms: Armenianism, Universalism, …[18 more isms, including Mormonism]. …In all these are combined those three unclean spirits out of the mouth of the dragon, beast, and false prophet….” [A] “‘[M]any false prophets are gone out into the world. …and this is that spirit of Antichrist whereof ye have heard that it should come…’ [1 John 4:3]. …What is Mormonism, with all its monstrous absurdities and manifest lies, but one of these?” [B]

Even without the direct correlation to Mormonism, the idea of a false prophet went along with apocalyptic horned animals. “This two horned beast is described by John in another part of the prophecy under the character of the pseudo-teacher, or false prophet.” [C] “Expositors generally are agreed that the false prophet is identical with another beast…and the eighth head” [Rev 13:11]. [D] “…the false prophet, the beast with two horns like a lamb that cometh up out of the earth.” [E] My non-quantitative impression is that most texts linked the beasts to Catholicism rather than generic false prophets while a smaller number singled out particular individuals and/or nations.

Mormons tended to understand the beasts allegorically, though some usages were ambiguous. “I know very well that the people called “Mormons” are thought to be a very strange people. I come right from among them, and you can all judge whether or not they seem to have the appearance of a strange animal of seven beads and ten horns. You can all decide for yourselves whether, from the appearance I present, I should be numbered among outcasts, or be ranked among human beings.” [F] “‘The seven heads are seven mountains;’ perhaps this alludes to the various elevated parts upon which the city of Rome was built. ‘The ten horns are ten kings,’ or kingdoms….” [G] “Some of Mr. [William] Miller’s followers had said that the Mormons were the beast spoken of by John; if, indeed, they are, they have not got so many eyes, ears, horns and hoofs, as he has manifested….” [H]

In fact, some Mormon Elders got so caught up in allegorizing that church leaders urged caution: “[A]bide by that revelation which says, ‘preach nothing but repentance to this generation,’ and leave the further mysteries of the kingdom…. The horns of the beast, the toes of the image, the frogs and the beast mentioned by John are not going to save this generation….” [I] A decade earlier, Oliver Cowdery seemed a bit hesitant in responding to another journalist’s application of Revelation 13:11 to Mormonism—though perhaps he objected more to the particular interpretation rather than the idea of allegory. “In what shape the “Banner” would have us understand that the religion contained, or advocated in the book of mormon, represents this saying of John is unknown to us…. For us to say, that a book represents a beast with two horns, is advancing a stretch into the system of spiritualizing, beyond any thing we have yet attained to.” [J]

[A] Elisha Putnam, The Crisis, or, Last Trumpet: An Antidote for Popular Opinion Either in Church or State (Albany, NY: E Putnam, 1847), 74; [B] No author listed, “The Signs of the Times,” The Christian Advocate and Scotch Baptist Repository 2 (London: 1850 Apr): 78-9 [73-81; cont’d from previous]. [C] Alexander Campbell [signed as “Editor”], “Prophetic Personages—Historic Prophecy, No. II,” The Millennial Harbinger 3:5 (Bethany, VA: 1832 May 02): 218-9 [214-9]; [D] Studens, “Aspects of the World,” The Evangelical Repository, edited by Joseph T Cooper, 8:12 (Philadelphia: 1850 May): 567-8 [561-9]; [E] John S Waugh, Dissertations on the Prophecies of Sacred Scripture Which Relate to the Antichristian Powers (Annan, Scotland: Wm Cuthbertson, 1833), 94. [F] William Smith, speech before Illinois House of Representatives, Springfield, IL, 1842 Dec 09, HC 5:202. [G] No author listed, “Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream,” from The Gospel Reflector (Philadelphia), reprinted in Times and Seasons 3:3 (Nauvoo, IL: 1841 Dec 01): 610 [607-14]. (Both the Reflector and Times and Seasons were Mormon papers); [H] No author listed, “Millerism,” Times and Seasons 4:11 (1843 Apr 15): 171 [168-71]. [I] Brigham Young, Heber C Kimball, John E Page, Wilford Woodruff, John Taylor, and George A Smith, open letter: “To the Elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, to the Churches Scattered Abroad, and to All the Saints,” Times and Seasons 1:1 (Commerce, IL: 1839 Nov): 13 [12-5]. [J] Oliver Cowdery [signed, “Editor of the Star”], no title, Evening and Morning Star 2:19 (1834 Apr): 151 [150-1].

[5] No author listed, “The Release of Gen. Joseph Smith,” Times and Seasons 4:4 (Nauvoo, IL: 1843 Jan 02): 60 [59-61].

[6] Heber C Kimball, “Discourse by Heber C Kimball Delivered in the Tabernacle, Great Salt Lake City, July 16, 1854,” Millennial Star 16:47 (1854 Nov 25): 740 [737-741].

In 1846 Warren Foote recorded meeting a man who, on learning Foote was Mormon, called his sons over and, “After looking at us he said to the boys ‘They havent [sic] got any horns have they! and they look like other folks don’t they.’ This he said laughing as he told us that the boys had thought that the ‘Mormons’ were terrible looking creatures.” Warren Foote, Diary entry, 1846 Jun 17, Autobiography of Warren Foote (typescript [np, nd] of his journals, Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, UT), 1.96-7, as quoted in Terryl L Givens, The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 136. Diary date provided by Paul Reeve, JI, 2008 Feb 12.

[7] The logic, “for X to act as they do toward Y they must think Y are Z, because if they thought them Q, they would never act thus,” has been and remains a staple of much political, social, and interpersonal discourse. Anecdotally, I observe that it often represents a false attribution caused by failure of imagination; there are usually several factors other than Z that could hypothetically influence X’s actions toward Y, some of which do not exclude Q, and few of which are amenable to proof.

An unidentified Mormon Elder preaching in New York in 1857 used similar logic: “I am a Mormon Elder, without horns or hoofs—although many people have such an idea of us that they think they must see a horn sticking out of us somewhere.” No author listed, “The Mormons. Their ‘Branch’ in New York,” New York Daily Times 1857 Jun 29, p4.

[8] Richard F Burton, City of the Saints, and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1862), 431; the cited text reprinted in Charles Carrington, ed, A Plea for Polygamy (Paris: Charles Carrington, 1898), 235-236 [224-238].

The Deseret Evening News agreed in 1868: “it is becoming tolerably well known that they [Mormons] do not wear horns, that they do not have cloven feet, that they are not ogres, and that they do not live by preying upon mankind.” No author listed, “Early Action in Favor of Railroad,” Deseret Evening News, reprinted in Millennial Star 30:29 (1868 Jul 18): 454 [454-5]. George Q Cannon went further afield for imagery: “There was a time in our history when people supposed that we were different from other men. I have travelled considerably, and when it was leaked out that I was a “Mormon,” they would gaze at me as though I was a creature from some other planet, or to see if I had horns or a cloven foot, or if there was not some distinguishing peculiarity about me different from other men. These ideas have passed away by contact.” George Q Cannon, speech printed as part of “The Mass Meeting,” Millennial Star 30:32 (1868 Aug 08): 501 [488-501].

[9] Blair reported meeting a man in 1875 that said “from what we had heard of your people, we thought they had horns….’” WW Blair, “Correspondence,” Sandwich, IL, 1875 Jun 21, True Latter Day Saints’ Herald 22:14 (1875 Jul 15): 439 [439-40]. Blair wrote the letter in Illinois after a mission in Wisconsin. The cited Dr continued: “but now, after hearing for ourselves, we are rather pleased with your doctrine.” Presumably, if he expected physical horns, he would have said something like “now, after seeing for ourselves, we know you do not have horns.”

[10] Continuing… “[visitors] fin[d] that [Mormons] have no horns; that they have no cloven feet; …and that if he had not been told these were ‘Mormons,’ he would not have discovered it by any outward sign.” George Q Cannon, “Revelation—The Privileges of the Saints, etc,” speech in Salt Lake City, 1881 Apr 24, JD 22.241; George Q Cannon, speech in Salt Lake City, 1884 Nov 23, transcribed by John Irvine, JD .284 [281-286].

[11] Charles Hemenway, in 1887 (while in prison for libel), claimed to have “heard a New England school mistress enquire, in all soberness, whether or not the polygamists had horns or looked at all like other people.” Charles W. Hemenway, Memoirs of My Day: In and Out of Mormondom (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Co, 1887), 134-5.

Sidney Weekes (in prison for polygamy) recorded the surprise of one visitor at Weekes’ hornless-ness. Weekes responded that “We have to wait until we get older”—despite his being nearly fifty. I have not examined the original document. I quote from a journal article: “Prison officials often introduced the Mormons to visitors, who viewed them as something of a curiosity. One woman expressed surprise that polygamist Sidney Weekes had no horns sprouting from his head, a reference to the medieval belief that a cuckolded man would grow horns. In jest he assured her, ‘We have to wait until we get older.’” The incident occurred in 1888. According to FamilySearch.org, the Sidney Weekes married to SE Pilgrim and A Bennett was born in 1842, making him 46/47 in 1888. I do not know if Weekes, the later compilers, or the article authors made the cuckoldry connection, which doesn’t quite fit since Weekes had not been cuckolded. The journal authors cite Karl E Young, who argued for a cuckoldry interpretation of Mormon horns. It is also not clear how much “surprise” the woman expressed. Melvin L. Bashore and Fred E. Woods, “Consigned to a Distant Prison: Idaho Mormons in the South Dakota Penitentiary,” South Dakota History 27:1-2 (1997 Spring/Summer): 32 [21-40]. The Weekes quote comes from Frank Weekes, compiler, “History of Sidney Weekes, Susan Elizabeth Pilgrim and Annie Bennett (Harris),” 1958, p 8, Bernice Weekes Collection, Rexburg, Idaho; Karl E. Young, “Why Mormons Were Said to Wear Horns,” in Lore of Faith and Folly, ed. Thomas E. Cheney (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1971), pp. 111-12.

A second-hand report of horns appeared in 1893: “[I] asked [an employee] if he was a Mormon, [he] said that he was, indeed, and why did I ask? Was it because I did not see his horns? Well, as to his horns, he was sorry to say he had none. He supposed they would begin to grow out when he got older. “I told a man once,” he added, “that I was a Mormon, and he said, ‘You don’t say so! I thought Mormons were queer-looking people and had horns.’” Julian Ralph, Our Great West: A Study of the Present Conditions and Future Possibilities of the New Commonwealths and Capit

President Wilford Woodruff used the “I’m too young for horns” quip (in the mouth of a “young Elder”) in an 1890 sermon. Wilford Woodruff, journalist’s report on a sermon, Salt Lake City, 1890 Nov 16, “Sunday Services,” Deseret Weekly 41:23 (1890 Nov 29): 753-4.als of the United States (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893), 395.

[12] For example: “I do not know how the people who are persuaded the ‘Mormons have horns’ would feel, could they see and hear such choirs as render the musical portions of the services in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, and at Logan, Ogden, Provo, Manti, St. George, Beaver and many other places.” WG Bickley, “Letter from England,” dated 1891 Jun 25, Deseret Weekly 43:4 (1891 Jul 18): 126.

See also: “While our train lay at Ogden a bevy of small girls with inquiring minds, and, as we afterwards learned, very intelligent, came into our car to see the porter make up the berths or ‘beds,’ as the girls called them. Their running fire of questions and conversation with the occupants of the car showed them to be very well informed concerning their Mormon religion, and one of the girls in expressing her amazement at the opinions entertained by the Eastern people concerning the Mormons said, ‘the Eastern folks come out here expecting to find us with horns and hoofs.’” TE Davis, ed, From New Jersey to California, ’97 (Somerville, NJ: CH Bateman, 1897), 116.

The 1893 “California immigrants”: ES Lovesy, “Something About Utah and Her People,” American Bee Journal 32:12 (1893 Sep 21): 369-70. Compare the “horn” story to the earlier anecdote related by EW Tullidge about President USS Grant:  “When President Grant, on his entrance to our city…passed the multitude of Sunday School children who, under their teachers, had gathered, arrayed in white to welcome him… he turned to Governor Emery and enquired, ‘whose children are these?’ He was answered by the Governor, ‘Mormon children.’ For several moments the President was silent, and then he murmured, in a tone of self-reproach, ‘I have been deceived!’” (Edward W Tullidge, History of Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City: Star Printing Co, 1886), 623; Grant visited SLC in 1875 Oct; italics in original).

The location is “The Tree of Life” (Shajarat al-Hayah) in southern Bahrain. It is a 100+ year-old tree out in the desert with no obvious source of water. It’s winter and the “wet” season, so things are greener than usual. See here for another image of the tree and a satellite shot showing the isolation. If one doesn’t get lost (ahem, and mea culpa), it’s about thirty minutes from my apartment.

You can tell it’s really me in the photo by the closed eyes, the partially untucked shirt, and the “stone” sketched, in a moving car, on lined notebook paper.

More photos of JI-ers and Keepa’ninnies with May are here.

In years past the Latter-day Saints were frequently referred to the suppression of the SUTTEE in India by act of the British Parliament, as a precedent and justification of certain congressional enactments…. [W]e thought perhaps a description…would be of interest to our readers. [1]

They weren’t kidding about the “frequently.” Acknowledging the potential for selection bias, “suttee” shows up over and over again in the documents I’ve examined. From the 1850s to the 1920s, Anglo-phone Mormons, non-Mormons, Britons, Americans, British Indians, Afrikaans, and British South Africans used one another for their polemics. [2] As the Improvement Era noted, references to India, Indians, and Hinduism were particularly common in the Mormon case.

Table of Contents

• The Indian War of 1857: The “Sepoy Mutiny” and the Mountain Meadows Massacre both occurred in 1857. Observers described Mormons as traitorous Sepoys in their inherent  nature.
• Suttee, Polygamy, and Religious Freedom: Mormons argued that the US Constitution protected the practice of polygamy as religious expression. Others (many others) countered that the British suppression of suttee in India demonstrated that when a religious practice offended certain societal norms, religion offered no shield. Further, the portrayals shift from “essence” to “colonial status.” Mormons returned that imperial history made it a poor role model.
• Imperialism, Collective Guilt, and Mountain Meadows: In deflecting calls to punish the whole church for MMM, John Taylor argued that imperial history overran with examples of morally repugnant acts so, if the British, French, and American nations were not punished for their sins, Mormonism should not be punished for its.
• Other Comparisons: Mutiny, Providence, Devotion, and Retribution: Assorted other comparisons appeared in print including potential for rebellion, Divine intervention, religious intensity, and Divine punishment.
• Mormons Cross the Frontier Line In the early twentieth century, the documents I’ve noticed shift Mormons from the role of Sepoys and other Indians to the role of British colonizers.

No pictures and no humorous anecdotes this time—the pictures because they were pretty intense and the humor because I didn’t find any. Some contemporary photographs (PG-13) are here.

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The comparisons seem to have started with the Indian War of 1857. [Edit, HT Ardis: Three weeks before the start of the Indian War, the NYDT ran an editorial using a suttee/polygamy comparison ("What Shall We Do with the Mormons?" NYDT 1857 Apr 21, p4).] For a variety of reasons, British Indian Sepoys revolted against the colonial overlords in 1857, massacring hundreds. [3] European portrayals of the Sepoy were, in a sense (and, characteristically for this sort of thing), self-contradictory. On one hand, Westerners described a sub-human creature of unbridled and unbridleable ferocity; on the other, they emphasized deceit and betrayal—exclusively human sins (see Figure 1; unidentified source).

Brutal and gruesome though the revolt had been, the British reaction “improved” upon disorganized “savagery” with the discipline and focus of “civilization.” The most famous of the retributions that bloody summer involved tying Sepoys to the front of loaded cannons and then discharging the cannons (see Figure 2).

That the Sepoy Rebellion, Mountain Meadows Massacre, and Utah War matched up so closely in time made associations convenient and natural. Observers compared Mormons to Sepoys almost immediately after the Sepoy Rebellion and the Mountain Meadows Massacre. A Washington DC newspaper editorialized on 1857 Nov 20 that

We can no longer disguise from ourselves the unwelcome fact that we too have our India and our “Sepoy” insurgents, since, whether we regard the remote and inaccessible position of the Salt Lake Territory or the sanguinary and brutal instincts of these modern Sodomites, we are left to find points rather of comparison than of contrast between our threatened relations to Utah and those which already exist between Great Britain and her East Indian provinces.

The article concluded noting that

If at the time it may have seemed to require a stretch of credulity to confide in revelations which disclosed in that community an organized system of vice and terrorism, the recent conduct of these Utah ‘Sepoys’ and the official manifestoes of their Nena Sahib would seem ample to confirm the accuracy of the information on which these predictions were founded. [4]

In this usage, describing Mormons as Sepoys positioned the Mormon essence as immoral, violent, treacherous, and a danger to the empire. Most Mormons, of course, rejected the comparison.

An 1858 analysis of the Rebellion concluded that there was “some reason for the charge that misgovernment created that character and thus produced the revolt.” However, the strategic error was “not in their being oppressed, but just the opposite, in their being “spoiled by kindness,” and too blindly trusted.” At any rate, an oblique reference to Mormons helped explain the Sepoys: “The oppression endured by other classes of the people had as much to do with the revolt of the Sepoys, as the sufferings of the unemployed in our cities with the Mormon rebellion.” [5]

Later analyses shifted away from essence and toward colonial status. For example, an 1883 travel narrative opined that “force of course will avail, in the end,” against polygamy, “just as it did in India when the [British] Government determined to stamp out female infanticide among the Rajpoots.” [6] It wasn’t that Mormons were morally similar to the Rajpoots but that their model for reproduction did not synch with the empire’s.

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The most prominent India / Utah comparison in the nineteenth century used the British suppression of suttee and other religious practices as a precedent for the American suppression of polygamy in Utah. [7] For example, in 1890, the US Supreme Court majority opinion explained:

One pretense for this obstinate course is that …the practice of polygamy…is a religious belief…. No doubt the Thugs of India imagined that their belief in the right of assassination was a religious belief…. The practice of suttee by the Hindu widows may have sprung from a supposed religious conviction. The offering of human sacrifices by our own ancestors in Britain was no doubt sanctioned by an equally conscientious impulse. But no one, on that account, would hesitate to brand these practices, now, as crimes against society…. [8]

Twenty years earlier, when US Vice-President Colfax made the argument to John Taylor, Taylor responded by draping himself in an American flag, setting off Fourth-of-July fireworks, and railing on the British: [9]

I do not look upon the British nation as a fit example for us; it was not so thought in the time of the Revolution. I hope we would not follow them in charging their cannon with Sepoys, and shooting them off, in this same India. I am glad, also, to find that our Administration views and acts upon the question of neutrality more honorably than our trans-atlantic cousins.

Immediately, however, Taylor switched tracks to empire and race, for which Britain provided an acceptable role-model:

…The British suppressed the suttee, but tolerated eighty-three millions of polygamists in India. …[I]t is absurd to compare the suttee to polygamy; one is murder and the destruction of life, the other is national economy and the increase and perpetuation of life. Suttee ranks truly with infanticide, both of which are destructive of human life. Polygamy is salvation compared with either, and tends even more than monogamy to increase and perpetuate the human race.

Very likely, Taylor and Colfax shared the assumption that if Whites did not multiply, the prolific “inferior” races would overwhelm the Anglo-Saxon germ that was preparing the world for the Millennium (whether or secular or religious, the racial basis didn’t change).

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Taylor also used British empire / colony experiences polemically, citing collective British guilt for the response to the Sepoy rebellion to deflect criticisms based on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. [10]

Do you [Mormons] deny it [the massacre]? No. Do you excuse it? No. There is no excuse for such a relentless, diabolical, sanguinary deed. That outrageous infamy is looked upon with as much abhorrence by our people as by any other parties in this nation or in the world.

Taylor goes on to argue, however, that “it does not seem fair to accuse nations, States and communities, for deeds perpetrated by some of their citizens, unless they uphold it.” For examples, he notes that “the British nation, to-day, abhor and revolt at the idea of their commander in India tying Sepoys to the mouths of their cannon and firing them off”; that the French “shudder at the refined cruelty and barbarity” of their military’s actions in Algiers; that “all honorable Americans repudiate with disdain the horrible butchery” at Haun’s Mill; and so on through other cases, including the murders of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. Then, after the standard obnoxious-Arkansan and mostly-Indian defenses, Taylor acknowledges that some Mormons might have participated.

…That any white man could be found to embark in it is a disgrace to humanity. I do not know it; but am afraid that some did; but being done, what then? who is responsible? Why say some, “The Mormon community.” Not quite so fast; by the same reason England, France, Missouri, Illinois and the United States must be held amenable for the acts above stated.

The argument could be read two ways: (1) the British, French, and Americans have no moral authority to criticize Mormons because everyone is guilty or, (2) there is no such thing as collective guilt. [11] In terms of the representational analysis we’re doing here, however, by using the Sepoy suppression to counter Mountain-Meadows attacks, Taylor partially legitimates the original comparison between Mormons and Sepoys. But, since in Taylor’s rhetoric the Sepoys are the victims, the analogy aligns the Mormons with other White, imperial powers that might have to kill a few natives every now and then to keep the empire working. Thus, Taylor simultaneously deflects the idea of collective guilt and positions Baker, Fancher, and company as Sepoys.

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India, Hinduism, Sepoys, and suttee found other uses for constructing Mormon identity and dealing with the “Mormon Question.” One George Curtis, concerned about the possibility that the US army would occupy Utah in the late 1880s, urged conciliation so as to avoid another Sepoy rebellion. [12] If Curtis had been a Mormon leader, it would have sound like a threat:

With unaccountable stupidity and carelessness the British government suffered the religious prejudices of the native troops of India to be violated and shocked by an unnecessary requirement of discipline. The Sepoy rebellion was the consequence. Who gave that provocation? I allude to this incident because it teaches a great lesson…. [13]

In some cases, the Hindu / Mormon comparison merely reflected the intensity of devotion—or mocked those who campaigned against Mormonism and its “worse-than-Indian-suttee-devotees.” [14] Elsewhere, Hinduism provided a backdrop for skewering Mormon doctrines:

According to the Brahmin, Vishnu, from a little fish, became a big fish, and from a big fish, a giant, and from a giant, a boar, and with his tusks raised the earth from the bottom of the waters. This was a feat sufficiently marvelous; but the Mormon has proved himself a match for the East Indian; the latter never dreamed of making human beings the raw material for manufacturing gods. [15]

In addition to illuminating imperial and legal issues, India and Sepoys also played roles in constructions of sacred time. A British cleric in 1859 interpreted the Sepoy rebellion and the rise of Mormonism, among other developments, as eschatological signs (and not the pleasant type). [16] Mormon author Orson F Whitney’s History of Utah (1904) reported that one Captain McCune, of the British Army, felt blessed by the timing of his resignation and emigration to Utah because if he had “delayed his departure a few weeks longer, he would have found it difficult if not impossible to leave. He and his family might have shared the fate of other Europeans massacred by the Sepoys during that perilous period.” [17]

That same year (1904), a Millennial Star piece promoted faith with a rumor about an Elder in India ejected from an area by a British officer commanding a squad of bayonet-wielding Sepoys. [18] Though “lapse of time and the failure to appreciate the far-reaching significance of events at the time they occur have perhaps obliterated the name of that Elder,” his alleged parting words remained: “You have turned me out at the point of the bayonet; these same bayonets will yet be turned on you.” Then, according to the 1904 author, “the Sepoy mutiny in 1857 was the dire sequel.”

Unlike most of its ilk, this morality tale has some contemporary documentation, or at least verification that someone was thinking such thoughts at the time. The 1857 Oct 24 Millennial Star reported that the British “armies in India have been smitten with a sore judgment because they cast out the Lord’s servants” and that the missionaries had left so that “the Lord might execute speedy judgment and show to all nations that His servants cannot be rejected with impunity.” [19]

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By 1915, the rhetorical relationship between Asian Indians and Mormons had changed significantly, at least for some commentators. For example:

[N]one can comprehend just what it means to be a girl-wife, two thousand miles away from her parents, to be treated as an alien, in a land under the flag of the free. This was the case in the strictly Mormon settlements in Utah thirty years ago. …The bravery of these women can be compared only to the English women of the Sepoy Rebellion days of 1857 in India, or to those of our American sisters who accompanied their valorous husbands to their isolated posts on the Indian frontiers…. Retreat and surrender never grew in the hearts of such women. [20]

Mormons and non-Mormons had been on opposite sides of the analogy, but now shared the white cowboy hat. Where previous incarnations focused on depraved Mormon men, now courageous Mormon women received the emphasis. In terms of race, character, and imperial affiliation, the Mormons had joined the power class. Not explored in the analogy is the corresponding placement of the US government in the place of the supposed savages of Asia and America.

Before closing… I think there might be a change in the type of Orientalization applied to Mormons over the nineteenth century—but I don’t yet have the data to make the case. There are two component ideas. First, Central Asians seem to be depicted as more savage and less developed than Middle or Far Easterners. Second, in the mid-1800s Sepoys and East Indians tended to represent Mormon character while by the turn of the century, the Turk or the Sultan seem to have dominated such representations, with the Chinese taking a part also. In terms of public image, it was a big step up for Mormonism.

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[2] I am aware of a few instances of Boers using Mormons as part of an argument but haven’t found convenient online sources in English or Afrikaans; I am not familiar with non-British Indian literature at all.

[3] “Sepoy” was a generic term for “native” soldiers in a colonial army. They need not serve in their homeland, though they often did. In nineteenth-century and present-day use, “Sepoy” refers almost exclusively to Sepoys serving the British in East India. The triggering incident involved gun grease containing animal fat, contact with which would render the soldier ritually unclean. In the neighborhood of three thousand British Whites were killed; consensus estimates claim hundreds of thousands of Indians (of various ethnicities and loyalties) killed and some scholars estimate as high as ten million over the following decade of British reaction.

[4] No author listed, “The ‘Sepoys’ at Our Own Doors,” Daily National Intelligencer, Washington DC, 1857 Nov 20, p3. I don’t know when news of the massacre reached Washington; The New York Times reported it on Nov 17. “Arrival of the St. Louis. $1,176,086 in Specie. Horrible Massacre of Arkansas and Missouri Emigrants,” from the Los Angeles Star Extra 1857 Oct 10, NYT 1857 Nov 17.

“Sodomite” here should be understood in a generic sense as “an immoral person” or a “person who engages in ‘unnatural’ sex,” where “natural sex” meant “monogamous, procreative sex” for the 1857 Washington audience. Later wits labeled Brigham Young the “Salt Lake Sodomite.” Alleen Pace Nilsen and Don Lee Fred Nilsen, Encyclopedia of 20th-Century American Humor (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 2000), 310. Nena or Nana Sahib was a prominent leader in the Sepoy Rebellion.

[5] John Cameron Lowrie, The Revolt of the Sepoys (New York: Edward O Jenkins, 1858; reprinted from The Princeton Review, 1858 Jan), 14-15, editorial footnote. For the author, however, the US had “evils in our own land that are legal, such as” slavery and the at-will breaking up of slave families. Such “legalized evils…would be hard to surpass by any thing in the government of India.”

[6] Phil Robinson, Sinners and Saints: A Tour Across the States, and Round Them; with Three Months among the Mormons (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1883), 115.

[7] “Suttee” is the ritual burning of a widow at her husband’s funeral. In theory, the immolation is voluntary. The English outlawed it 1829 Dec 04. Of course, it was several years until the practice could plausibly be claimed as abolished. Charles James Napier, in charge of enforcing the new law allegedly said: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. We will follow ours.” Marion Grein and Edda Weigand, Dialogue and Culture (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007), 11.

[8] Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints v United States, 136 US 49-50 (1890). Conversely, British courts used Mormon precedents to argue polygamy cases in its Indian and South African colonies. American temperance advocates used both religions: “Let even belief take the overt form of polygamy, as among the Mormons, or as suttee among the Hindoos, and the law brushes aside the claim to liberty of action, and interposes its stern denial. The religionist is not allowed to make his conscience the justification of social evil, and neither can the drinker of intoxicating liquor….” Dawson Burns, The Bases of the Temperance Reform: An Exposition and Appeal, with Replies to Numerous Objections (New York: National Temperance Society and Publishing House, 1873), 161.

[9] John Taylor, “Reply of John Taylor to the Honorable Vice-President Schuyler Colfax, on The Mormon Question” in The Mormon Question, Being a Speech of Vice-President Schuyler Colfax… (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Office, 1870). Reprinted in Edward W Tullidge, The History of Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City: Star Printing, 1886), 424. Something I learned writing this post: fireworks have been part of July 4th celebrations from the beginning. James R. Heintze, “The First Fireworks on the Fourth of July,” Fourth of July Celebrations Database <gurukul.american.edu/heintze/fourth.htm>, accessed 2009 Aug 12.

[10] John Taylor, “Utah and the ‘Mormons,’ Sixth Letter,” from Deseret News, in Millennial Star 36 no 19 (1874 May 12): 289-293 [290-1].

[11] It should be noted that present-day research indicates that many Mormons did, in fact, “uphold” the massacre in misrepresenting events and shielding participants.

[12] George Ticknor Curtis, Letter to the Secretary of the Interior on the Affairs of Utah, Polygamy, “Cohabitation,” &c. (Washington DC: Gibson Brothers, 1886), 27.

[13] Curtis went on to argue that allowing Mormons due process would defuse the situation.

[14] Robert C Webb, The Real Mormonism: A Candid Analysis of an Interesting but Much Misunderstood Subject in History, Life, and Thought (New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1916), 260.

[15] Benjamin G. Ferris, Utah and the Mormons: The History, Government, Doctrines, Customs, and Prospects of the Latter-day Saints (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856), 223.

[16] No author listed, Review of The Great Tribulation: or, The Things Coming on the Earth by John Cumming (London: Richard Bentley. 1859), The London Review 13 no 26 (1860 Jan): 407-444 [411].

[17] Orson F Whitney, “Alfred William McCune,” History of Utah, 4 volumes (Salt Lake City: George Q Cannon and Sons, 1904), vol 4, p505.

[18] Henry J Lilley, “Mission Work in India,” Millennial Star 66 no 33 (1904 Aug 18): 514-5.

[19] No author listed [Orson Pratt], “A Prophetic Warning to the Inhabitants of Great Britain,” Millennial Star 19:43 (1857 Oct 24): 680-1. Lilley surmises that the 1857 quote “probably… alludes to this incident” of the rejected, prophesying Elder. The Millennial Star also printed the report in 1886, identifying its author as Orson Pratt upon his departure from the European Mission. “A Prophecy,” Millennial Star 48:9 (1886 Mar 01): 138 [138-8].

[20] James David Gillilan, Trail Tales (New York: Abingdon Press, 1915), 140-1.

As I’ve explained before, I’m abusing my position as a perma to focus my thesis writing, get positive reinforcement, and maybe even some critical feedback. That is, I’m posting zero- and first-drafts of my current research. At some point I hope to take a machete and go on a frenzied, verbiage-slaughtering rampage to rein in all this prolixity. [3] Until then… you’ll survive. (See also: Cow, don’t have a.) To facilitate skimming and/or skipping, I give you, “The Table of Contents”:

• Herds, Dupes, and Identity: Some cow imagery portrayed Mormons as stupid, caught up in a herd-mentality, or depraved. Such formulations placed Mormons outside the bounds of Whiteness, American-ness, and true wo/manliness. From the Early Republic to the Progressive Era, however, cultural values changed, and so did the symbolic tools for constructing identity.
• Mormon Beef, the Mormon Cow War, and Civilization’s Boundaries: Successfully portraying rivals and enemies as less-civilized or out-and-out savage conveyed economic and political power—and especially land rights. The “bovinicity” of the MCW and Mormon Beef are tangential, but both incidents illustrate multi-directional contestation of civilizational boundaries.
• The Progressive, Assimilating Golden Calf: Sectarian strife often included accusations of profit-mongering, of “dancing round the golden calf.” Over the nineteenth century, Mormons became richer and thus more susceptible to such critiques; Progressive ideals and the continued democratization of “mainstream” American Protestantism made it worse. On the other hand, capitalism ran/runs deeply in American culture so—paradoxically—criticizing Mormons for economic success included them more fully in the American body politic. Mormonism’s “tribe-to-trust” transition kept nasty comments in the newspapers, but fundamentally changed the stakes of anti-Mormon critique.
• The Contradictory Galloping Golden Calf: None of the above came off neatly, easily, or quickly. Various ideas, trends, and motifs overlapped and contradicted one another. Some cognitive disjunctions in constructions of Mormon gender, economic strength, and nationality made the othering of Mormonism more, rather than less, culturally useful; some contradictions were features, not bugs.

What I judge to be humorous quips/anecdotes from the sources appear in notes 9, 13, 24, and 34.

I haven’t decided if the next installment will focus on India, Hinduism, and Sepoys or Octopuses, Leviathans, the Otherwise-tentacled, and Spiders.

Herds, Dupes, and Identity [Back to TOC]

In 1854 Benjamin Ferris denigrated Mormon men for taking “as little care of their wives as of their children; and of both, less than a careful farmer in the States would of his cattle.” Male Mormons neglected their duties so thoroughly that “nowhere out of the ‘Five Points’ in New York city [could] a more filthy, miserable, neglected-looking, and disorderly rabble of children be found” than in Salt Lake. [4] The inability to provide for a family, whether through incompetence, unwillingness, or bondage, indicated less-than-full American-ness, manliness, and Whiteness. [5] Irish immigrants from the Five Points—not-yet-White, not yet American, and not Protestant—completed the invidious comparison. [6]

Besides the individual dishonor, in both the Early Republic and the Victorian Era, the fate of the nation rested ideologically on the strength of its homes, though for different reasons. “Republican virtue” called for independent, yeoman farmers (male, of course) to support the nation by participating civically, maintaining social honor, and pursuing individualist happiness. The later Victorian ethos, as exemplified by Ann Eliza Young’s 1875 exposé, focused more on men’s “finer feelings and sensibilities” than their actions. [7] She intoned that, under polygamy, man “regarded women’s suffering with utter indifference; he did not care for their affection; their tears bored him, and angered rather than touched him.” Perhaps most damningly, “he lost all respect and chivalrous regard…, and spoke of his wives as ‘my women,’ ‘my heifers,’ or, if he, a Heber Kimball, ‘my cows.’” [8]

Kimball’s statement about his conjugal “cows” generated gobs of copy. [9] The earliest I’ve identified comes from John Hyde, Jr, who used it, along with other actions, in 1857 to demonstrate that polygamy caused men to “lose all decency or self-respect, and degenerate into gross and disgusting animals.” [10] As above, early references focused on deeds while later usage emphasized sentiments. An 1890s author wrote, “When President Kimball calls his numerous wives his ‘cows,’ he but reflects the Mormon idea of woman in the social scale.” [11]

Other observers mixed commentary on Mormonism’s Progressive credentials—in this case, sensitivity to women’s social position—with descriptions of presumed intellect. For example, naturalist John Muir described groups of Mormon women “on the streets…, looking as innocent and unspeculative as a lot of heifers” as well as a speech about “the good things of life” that “enumerated fruitful fields, horses, cows, wives, and implements, the wives being placed as above, between the cows and implements, without receiving any superior emphasis.” [12]

A much earlier observation of a group of Mormon immigrants took the evil-leader / duped-follower tack, emphasizing Mormonism’s collective features: “In the countenances of these there was no cast that betrayed a character, either of particular saintliness or sin. In most of them, the expression was simply stolid and bovine; and it was evident that these were the mere cattle of the herd.” [13]

Most bulls have two horns, however, and Mormons and their supporters also employed rhetorical bovines; enter Ambrose Bierce, setting newspapers on fire in 1890:

[T]he Mormons have abjured polygamy and promised to obey the law; yet the reverend gentlemen mentioned find in this action provocation for new calumny and fresh insult. It is clear that nothing will ever sate the bovine rage of these orthodoxen [sic] but the driving forth of this harmless people into the desert again, the shooting of their leaders, and the flogging of their women. [14]

Cow imagery, from “cattle” or “orthodoxen,” could convey an “un-American” collectivism, a “non-White” intellectual level, and a position of social subordination.

Mormon Beef, the Mormon Cow War, and Civilization’s Boundaries [Back to TOC]

The non-Johnny-Lingo Mormon bovines most familiar to present-day audiences probably come from the “Mormon Cow War” and the Liberty Jail “Mormon beef” diet. Both episodes reveal contestations of savagery and civilization.

In 1854, a stray cow from a Mormon immigrant train met up with an inexperienced Army officer’s enthusiastic stupidity and sparked a battle between the soldiers and local Sioux, resulting in the deaths of all twenty-nine involved soldiers and one Sioux. The cow wandered off; some Sioux found, killed, and ate it; the Mormons told the soldiers; the soldiers over-reacted; and the Sioux killed them all. Later (much later) commentators called the event the “Mormon Cow Incident,” the “Case of the Mormon Cow,” and the “Mormon Cow War” (see Figure 1). [15] Contemporary reports focused on Indian depravity and American honor: Indian soldiers mercilessly killed everyone—never mind that they were attacked with two cannons; American soldiers died bravely—never mind that they took almost thirty armed men and two cannon to complain about a deserted, lame cow. The take-home message here is that, in the American West, Euro-Americans almost always measured civilization and savagery relative to a constructed identity for Native American Peoples. Whatever else Mormons were, they ranked higher than Indians.

Soon after the Church’s organization, anti-Mormons charged that Mormons associated with, acted like, and were like “the savages.” [16] One Mormon defense involved counter-accusations of savagery. “You’re savage.” “Am not. You are.” “Am not.” “Are, too.” And so on. After their incarceration at Liberty (1838), Hyrum Smith and companions claimed that during one week the Liberty guards offered only human flesh as food. [17] Further, the guards boasted that the meat had been carved from dead Saints; they called it “Mormon beef.” [18] Mormons cited the story repeatedly in subsequent decades. [19] “I’m not savage. You are.”

An 1886 journalistic interchange illustrates the process. The Liberty Tribune of Liberty, Missouri, published a brief piece on the Liberty Jail, including an engraving and noting that “This antique edifice may be said to be historic. In the year 1838 Joe Smith, the famous prophet of the Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, was immured within its walls.” [20] I might be reading too much into the limited text, here, but it sounds like Renan’s “joy of fratricide”: shared history can make an “us,” even if that history is mutual antagonism. The Liberty editors seem to have moved into a new time. The Deseret Evening News in Salt Lake, on the other clock hand, still inhabited the old time: “It was in this same Liberty Jail that the brethren…were subjected to the most inhuman treatment that the ingenuity of demons could devise.” [21] Penrose goes on to re-tell the Mormon-beef tale and then remonstrates that

If the present inhabitants of Liberty know of these things they ought to never think of that jail but with a sense of the keenest shame. It ought to remain to them a standing reproach for the dark deeds perpetrated within its unhallowed precincts, and the inhuman treatment to which inspired servants of God were there subjected.

It turns out that the Missouri editor hadn’t forgotten after all or Penrose’s piece brought to the surface some repressed memories.

It is not denied that the Mormons were subjected to some harsh treatment at the hands of the people of Jackson and Clay counties; but we submit that it was nothing more than their just deserts, brought on by their own absurd, unlawful and fanatical theories and practices. [22]

More to the point, the Liberty Tribune expostulates that

The charge that, whilst the prisoners were confined in jail at Liberty, they were fed on or offered ‘Mormon beef,[’] or human flesh, is as false as Dicer’s oaths, [23] and is too preposterous to be entertained even for a moment by any other than the most ridiculous Mormon fanatic….

At stake, of course, is more than who gets the nice seats at the community church and gets to stick out their pinky whilst sipping expensive liquids. The Mormon sense of “Manifest Destiny” gave them the right—as the chosen, more civilized, more righteous people—to displace the pre-inhabitant savages. Vice versa and five decades later, American Manifest Destiny dictated that the forces of Anglo-Saxon, American civilization qualified its denizens to displace Mormon and Indian savages.

The Progressive, Assimilating Golden Calf [Back to TOC]

Another frequent Mormon bovine instantiation involved allusions to the Aaronic Golden Calf, most commonly representing greed or idolatry. [24] The application to Mormonism was hardly unique; golden calves showed up in many places (see two cartoons). A fairly typical assessment of “the reverend guides and directors of the Mormon people” claimed that “as usual with their class in all ages and countries, these men are inveterate worshipers of the golden calf. They bow before it, it fills their imaginations, and concentrate their desires.” [25]

Accusations of idolatrous greed could, however, point in other directions:

It is true we have within our borders Mormonism, and Mahometanism, and even Buddhism…. But these are mere barnacles sticking to the great body politic. They are no part of American civilization. …But… if we are ever to be a great nation hereafter, the protesting, puritanic Christianity of progress must keep the lead…. It will naturally rise over all paganisms because it is better. But there is one idolatry that makes it tremble already—the Moloch of selfishness. Men again dance round the Golden Calf.” [26]

Mormons took up this line with enthusiasm: “To-day many of the ministers…preac[h] for filthy lucre, not righteousness. These have bowed down to the golden calf.” [27] Priestcraft and selfishness were, of course, not new accusations in sectarian tussling and Mormons gave and took many such swipes in their first century (and since). However, as Progressive sentiments built momentum near the end of the nineteenth century, the stakes raised. Sectarians could co-opt the popular critique of modern greed and use it against their rivals.

The consequences of such strategies and trends varied for Mormonism. On the one hand, Mormon economic and political power had grown considerably. Even though Mormon centralization began to weaken, increased Mormon population and prosperity led to an overall increase in Mormonism’s temporal power—especially in comparison to many of the “mainstream” churches. Thus, Mormonism found itself relatively more vulnerable to profit-based criticism. Extensive church involvement in business trusts, such as the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, did not help in this regard. [28]

On the other hand, focusing on economic and political organization shifted the terms of debate in Mormonism’s favor. The “tribe” to “trust” transition reversed the action/essence trend in gender, race, and national identity described above. The Mormon “tribe” was inherently un-American, non-White, and the wrong kind of man- and womanly; the Mormon “trust” was dangerous and did bad things but only needed a stern talking-to and maybe a Sherman-Anti-Trust whipping before it would behave.

Also: despite all the Progressive cant and impassioned editorials, “capitalist,” “individualist,” and “profit-oriented” still described—in broad terms—American actions very well. To say that Mormons “danced around the gold calf” was one of the most inclusive things written in an American newspaper about Mormonism up to that point. In retrospect, the sea change was like the difference in antagonism between two groups trying to play different sports on the same field and the same two groups opposing each other in the same sport on that field.

The Contradictory, Galloping Golden Calf [Back to TOC]

Like many social and cultural changes, the difference only seems clear or quick looking back. While it was happening, motifs of the simultaneously rich and poor Mormon overlapped in a familiar, contradictory pattern. The idea of greedy, rich Mormons mounting a meaningful assault on the nation by subterfuge and intrigue—while living in small houses with unhappy women, dirty children, and little money—beggars the linear imagination. [29] In a similar way (but larger scale), descriptions of African-American males as simultaneously stupid, lazy, disorganized, cowardly—and involved in a massive, secret conspiracy to overthrow White rule by force—send smoke out logician’s ears.

The contradiction defused fears and tensions. Making acquisitiveness a moral characteristic of Mormonism turned it into a far less ferocious bugbear. Mormon greediness revealed its moral degeneracy while poverty revealed its practical incompetence. Thus, neither God nor Mammon really fought for the Mormon—meaning hard-working, God-fearing, daughter-raising Americans could sleep peacefully at night. The contradiction also played into the same gender / race / nationality critique as above: (supposedly) choosing not to care for their families despite wealth made Mormons less White, less manly, and less American.

Sorting through the chromosomes of cows and steers and heifers and bulls and so on highlights another feature of mid-Mormon discourse: the “Mormon” was male. Other than a few scattered “Mormonesses,” “the Mormon and his wives” populated newspapers and magazines. As has been observed in detail elsewhere, the obstinate Mormon-ness of Mormon women stuck in many craws. The idea of White women choosing such a path undermined the logic of both Early Republic and Victorian social models: impure women led to dysfunctional homes led to societal collapse. Thus, by focusing on the leadership and the men (and denying the Whiteness), anti-Mormonism reduced existential anxiety. It were one thing to have dupes and abused women—the “cattle”—burdening the nation, but quite another to have rational folks with “American” genealogies and “White” skin willfully and informedly pursuing such heresy in quantity. [30]

Further, focusing on leaders and the patriarchy lessened the ideological stakes. Assimilating peoples into an empire could be grubby work that didn’t match the imperial recruitment brochures. Disenfranchising, incarcerating, and impoverishing a few evil, male leaders reduced cognitive dissonance for “freedom-loving” Americans. Rhetorically, anti-Mormonism crusaded to bring democracy to Mormons; Mormon pens and pulpits, of course, claimed precisely the opposite, that Mormonism defended democracy against tyrannical apostates from true American-ness. Along the same lines, the women-and-children-first rhetoric co-opted, in some cases, feminist efforts. A commentator could use anti-Mormonism to trumpet concern for women while not giving up anything he/she cared about. Finally, the evil-leader strategy provided a rhetorical out. If someone happened to know an upstanding Mormon then it were small potatoes to wave hands and claim artful deception, insignificant cattle, or maverick. [31]

Orientalism provided another potential—and potentially contradictory—application of bovine symbology. However, the few “sacred cow” and “holy cow” usages I found lacked Orientalist connotations. [32] I found an RLDS source labeling the “Adam-God” a golden calf and another source identifying Mormonism itself as the idol, but the calves generally invoked “wicked Israel” rather than “Oriental Egypt.” [33] I have not explored whether the irony of rhetorically aligning “pure” Anglo-Saxon Christianity with Judaism ever struck contemporaries. A variety of other Mormon cows lumbered through the archives, but none struck me as exposing unseen aspects of the Zeitgeist. [34]

Rounding up

The Mormon cattle motif—like Mormon crickets, Mormon lice, and Mormon flies—emphasized the herd / swarm / collective aspects of Mormonism, with the concomitant idea of evil-leaders / duped-followers. Bovine metaphors also helped construct gender, race, and nationality distinctions while conveying passivity, lasciviousness, and greed. However, despite ill intentions, golden-calf discourse positioned Mormons more securely within the American body politic.

[2] Figurative communication is mostly wasted on Deacons, which is what I was last I saw it. Johnny Lingo (Brigham Young University / Encyclopedia Britannica, 1969).

[3] One of my favorite editing quotes comes from Sarah Lyall writing about David Halberstam: “Here’s what’s really been upsetting me about War in a Time of Peace. You hint at it when you say, quite reasonably, that “an editor who wasn’t afraid of Halberstam could have done some judicious pruning.” Judicious pruning? Someone needed to take a machete and go on a murderous anti-verbiage rampage, whopping out whole sections of the forest.” Sarah Lyall, “David Halberstam’s breathless, deathless prose,” Slate <www.slate.com>, 2001 Sep 06.

[4] Benjamin G. Ferris, Utah and the Mormons: The History, Government, Doctrines, Customs, and Prospects of the Latter-day Saints… (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1854), 249. The Ecclesiastical document, “Mormon bull,” appeared in print in 1842: “the pontifical bull is harmless in comparison with the Mormon bull, (Joe’s letter of marque and reprisal,) as the latter terminates… in murder, coldblooded, Danite murder!” John C Bennett, letter to the Louisville Journal, 1842 Jul 30, reprinted in John C Bennet, The History of the Saints; or, An Exposé of Joe Smith and Mormonism (Boston: Leland & Whiting, 1842), 217.

[5] I’ve already packed my books, so no cite. The general trend in the mid-nineteenth century was, “Bound because Black” to “Black because bound”—with gradations proportionate to degree of bondage as wage laborer, indentured servant, and so on.

[6] Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).

[7] Ann Eliza Young, Wife No. 19, or The Story of a Life in Bondage, Being a Complete Exposé of Mormonism… (Hartford: Dustin, Gilman & Co, 1875), 292.

[8] Both eras held much in common and the action/essence distinction should not be interpreted rigidly, but there does seem to be a general shift from practical to existential horror. See also: Jennie Anderson Froiseth, The Women of Mormonism; or, The Story of Polygamy as Told by the Victims Themselves (Detroit: CGG Paine, 1887; first edition, 1881), 30 and passim.

[9] I am not aware of Hyde’s source or corroborating records, but the statement seems plausible for Kimball’s personality. I give just three of many examples here: “The Mormons call their wives their cattle; they choose them pretty much as they choose cattle; and that great pink of delicacy, Heber C. Kimball…calls his women his cows” John Cradlebaugh (a territorial judge in Utah), in a speech, as reported in Nashville Daily News (1860 Mar 25), as cited by Edwin Brown Firmage and Richard Collin Mangrum, Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001 [reprint]), 133; William Warner Bishop quotes the same material in the introduction to John Doyle Lee’s Mormonism Unveiled, or, The Life and Confessions of the Late Mormon Bishop, John D. Lee (St Louis: Bryan, Brand, & Co, 1877), 27; “It used to be said that one must have three [plural wives] to be wholly acceptable in respectable society, and the biography of apostle Heber C. Kimball credits him with forty-five wives, whom he lovingly designated as ‘cows.’” Theodore Schroeder, “Polygamy and the Constitution,” The Arena 30:204 (1906): 492-497 [494]; “Apostle Kimball used to refer to his wives as ‘my cows.’” Hans P. Freece, “Polygamy,” Utah, 1906 Oct, The Letters of an Apostate Mormon to His Son (Elmira, NY: Chemung Printing, 1908), 14.

My personal favorite comes from humorist Artemus Ward: “Brother Kimball is a gay and festive cuss…. He has one thousand head of cattle and a hundred head of wives. He says they are awful eaters.” Artemus Ward, “The Lecture,” first delivered in London, 1866 Nov 13, The Complete Works of Artemus Ward (Charles F. Browne) (London: Chatto & Windus, 1899), 378. [Back to TOC]

[10] As evidence, he claimed that “many” Mormon men “frequently sleep with two of their wives in the same bed” and that “Heber C. Kimball does not scruple to speak of his wives, on a Sabbath, in the Tabernacle, and before an audience of over two thousand persons, as ‘my cows!!’ [sic].” John Hyde, Jr, Mormonism: Its Leaders and Designs (New York: WP Fetridge & Co, 1857), 57.

[11] William W Bishop, introduction to JD Lee, Mormonism Unveiled, 27.

[12] John Muir, Steep Trails, edited by William Frederic Badè (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 110-1. The cited text comes from a letter written in Salt Lake City, 1877 May 15.

[13] Mayne Reid, “The Wild Huntress, Chapter 93: The Corralled Camp,” Chamber’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts 14:362 (London: 1860 Dec 08): 576. Huntress appeared serially from 14:340 (1860 Jul 07) to 14:365 (1860 Dec 29); it was republished as a book (3 vols, London: Richard Bentley, 1861).

A 1918 piece in the Mormon Young Woman’s Journal criticized “over-rested,” “over-massaged” women “whose time is monopolized by THINGS”: “much powder and paint can not conceal the innocuous, bovine expression which she habitually wears. She has an adipose intellect; a lethargic soul.” Jean Brown Fonnesbeck, “When a Girl Marries,” The Young Woman’s Journal 29:6 (1918 Jun): 338-41 [340]. [Back to TOC]

[14] Ambrose Bierce, San Francisco Examiner, 1890 Oct 13, as quoted in, “What the Papers Say,” no author listed, The Deseret Weekly 61:18 (1890 Oct 25): 594-5. The quoted sentence began with “In as manly, straightforward and definitive a way as it could have been done, the Mormons have abjured polygamy and promised to obey the law….” I have not examined whether Bierce ever regretted his evaluation in light of Mormon waffling.

[15] Many refer to the event as the “Grattan Massacre” after the commanding officer. The conflict ended the 1851 Horse Creek Treaty truce and led to the Sioux Wars, which reduced the Sioux over the subsequent thirty-five years. I have not searched in detail, but “Mormon Cow War” and similar seem to come far after the original event. For preliminary example, the New York Daily Times’s initial reporting gave the Mormon connection only tangential ink. NYDT 1854 Sep 12 p8, Sep 18 p2, Oct 24 p2, Nov 09 p6, Nov 23 p3. The earliest “Mormon Cow” label I’ve noticed comes from the early 1910s.

Incident: Mary Beth Norton, Carol Sheriff, David M Katzman, David W Blight, Howard Chudacoff, Fredrik Logevall, A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, Brief Edition (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 337; Case: Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), 223; War: Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, Crimsoned Prairie: The Wars between the United States and the Plains Indians During the Winning of the West (New York: Scribner, 1972), 17. See also the chapter entitled, “The Mormon Cow,” in Addison Erwin Sheldon, History and Stories of Nebraska (Chicago: University Publishing Co, 1914), 97; Richard Jepperson, author, Ken Mundie, illustrator, The War of the Mormon Cow: Being the First Part of the Crazy Horse Chronicles (Park City, UT: String of Beads Publication, 2000); Stanley Buchholz Kimball, Historic Sites and Markers along the Mormon and Other Great Western Trails (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 127.

[16] Paul H Reeve, MHA 2009 presentation.

[17] “We were also subjected to the necessity of eating human flesh, for the space of five days, or go without food, except a little coffee, or a little corn bread, the latter I chose in preference to the former. We none of us partook of the flesh except Lyman Wight; we also heard the guard which was placed over us making sport of us, saying that they had fed us upon ‘Mormon beef.’ I have described the appearance of this flesh to several experienced physicians, and they have decided that it was human flesh. We learned afterwards, by one of the guard, that it was supposed that that act of savage cannibalism, in feeding us with human flesh, would be considered a popular deed of notoriety; but the people on learning that it would not take, tried to keep it secret; but the fact was noised abroad before they took that precaution.” Hyrum Smith, affidavit in “Municipal Court of the City of Nauvoo, Illinois,” Times and Seasons 4:16 (1843 Jul 16): 255-6; Also, with changes: History of the Church, 3.420.

“[Lyman Wight] said, ‘The jailor…fed us on a scanty allowance of filthy and unpalatable food, and for five days on human flesh; from extreme hunger I was compelled to eat it.’ The guards inquired, ‘How do you like Mormon beef?’” Brigham Young, “History of Brigham Young,” Millennial Star 27:30 (1865 Jul 29): 471 [471-3]; also, with changes: HC 3.448.

[18] “One of the prisoners suspected that at one time an attempt was made to feed them upon ‘human flesh,’ basing his suspicion upon the appearance of the meat and the fact that one of the guards made sport of the prisoners, saying that he had fed them on ‘Mormon beef,’ but this boast might have arisen from the fact that ‘Mormon’ cattle were brought in and killed for beef. Bad as the Missourians were, they are entitled to the benefit of the doubt that exists in the case of such a revolting crime.” Brigham H Roberts, Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1.521.

A Google-snippet of Samuel Woolley Taylor, The Kingdom or Nothing: The Life of John Taylor, Militant Mormon (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 54, comments on the subject: “ ‘Mormon beef,’ John Hogarth said with a grin, ‘horsemeat. Trouble with those guys, they can’t take a joke.’” I have not examined the source; it could be fictional for all I know. At any rate, “it was just joking / bravado / cruelty / mob psychology” seems to me a plausible explanation. See also: Bill McKeever, “Mormon Beef, It’s What’s For Dinner – Or Is It?” Mormonism Research Ministry, <www.mrm.org>, accessed 2009 Aug 11; Sandra Tanner, “Letters to the Editor: Joseph Smith and ‘Mormon Beef,’” 2005 Sep 12, Utah Light Ministries, <www.utlm.org>, accessed 2009 Aug 11.

[19] For context on “remembering” Missouri, see David W Grua, “Memoirs of the Persecuted: Persecution, Memory, and the West as a Mormon Refuge,” Master’s Thesis, Brigham Young University, 2008 Dec. Print retellings appeared in, for examples, 1853, ’65, ’68, ’76, ’88, ’92, 1900, ’00, and ’02. (Lucy Smith, Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith… (Liverpool: Orson Pratt, 1853), 244; Millennial Star 27:30 (1865 Jul 29): 471 [471-3], 30:48 (1868 Nov 28): 757 [753-7], and 38:30 (1876 Jul 24): [467] 465-7; Contributor 7 (1885): 447; Historical Record 7:1-3 (1888 Jan): 456; OF Whitney, History of Utah (SLC: GQ Cannon, 1892), 164; GQ Cannon, History of Joseph Smith Written for Young People (SLC: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1900), 156; BH Roberts, The Missouri Persecutions (SLC: GQ Cannon, 1900), 268; and Improvement Era 5:11 (1902 Sep): 838.)

The Brighamites didn’t just write about “Mormon beef.” Conference talks and tourist records suggest the Mormons talked about it, too. Jules Remy and Julius Lucius Brenchley, A Journey to Great-Salt-Lake City, 2 vols (London: W Jeffs, 1861), 1.316, translated republication of Voyage au Pays des Mormons, 2 vols, (Paris: E Dentu, 1860), 1.270; George A Smith, “Historical Address,” Salt Lake City, 1868 Oct 08-9, transcribed by David W Evans, JD 13:108 [103-124].

Josephites also remembered: HCRLDS (Lamoni, IA: 1897) 2.685-6; Daniel MacGregor, A Marvelous Work and a Wonder: The Gospel Restored, 2nd ed (Lamoni, IA: Herald, 1911), 127; Google Snippet: Vision: A Magazine for Youth 24 (1911): 76. Interestingly, MacGregor and Vision up the number from five or so to “Fifty or sixty of the Saints.”

[20] As quoted in Charles W Penrose, ed, “Missouri Memories,” Deseret Evening News, Salt Lake City, UT, 1886 Feb 27, p2, c2.

[21] “Missouri Memories,” Deseret Evening News, 1886 Feb 27. No offense to Penrose and no irreverence toward Missouri suffering, but I must hang out with more creative demons than Penrose if the “most inhuman” his can do is suspicion of involuntary cannibalism.

[22] No author listed, “Memoirs of the Mormons,” Liberty Tribune, Liberty, MO, 1886 Mar 12, p2, c4-5.

[23] A “dicer’s oath” is that of a gambler swearing to give up gambling—false and flagrantly unreliable. See Shakespeare, Hamlet, III.4, when Hamlet confronts his mother about her fratricidal, brother-in-law husband: “Such an act / … / … makes marriage-vows / As false as dicers’ oaths….”

[24] A typical example: “[M]y servant Almon Babbitt…aspireth to establish his counsel…; and he setteth up a golden calf for the worship of my people” (D&C 124:84). A 1943 Mormon-friendly history followed suit: “Samuel Brannan was not the only Latter-day Saint guilty of lifting eyes to the golden calf. A spirit of worldliness seems to have permeated the entire San Francisco colony through that winter of 1847-48.” Paul Bailey, Sam Brannan and the California Mormons (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1943), 77.

My favorite, describing an army mule: “He could look as sober as though his whole intellect were grinding on the plus and minus of some unsolved problem, like that, for example, which the Book of Mormon and Mohammed’s Koran and Clarke’s Commentaries with all their attention to detail have neglected,—whether Aaron’s golden calf was a Holstein or a Jersey.” Henry A Castle, “The Army Mule,” in Glimpses of the Nation’s Struggle, 2nd Series, Papers read before the Minnesota Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, 1887-1889, edited by Edward Duffield Neill (St. Paul: St. Paul Book and Stationary Co, 1890), 338-366 [345]. [Back to TOC]

[25] Austin N Ward, The Husband in Utah, or, Sights and Scenes among the Mormons: With Remarks on their Moral and Social Economy, edited by Maria Ward (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859), 280. John C Bennett made a similar, earlier critique: “Many of the poor Gentiles…go to Nauvoo, …but the golden calf is not to be found there! Joseph has fled….” Bennett, History of the Saints, 278. These two examples are easily multiplied. Perhaps curiously, I have not yet noticed any golden calf / golden plates quips.

[26] William A Phillips, “The Age and the Man,” in Echoes of Harper’s Ferry by James Redpath (Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860), 361-383 [370]. “The patriarchal Mormon, waxing fat in the material prosperity of flocks and herds and wives, snaps his fingers at a Republic that consecrates the tables of the money-changers….” No author listed, “The Golden Calf,” Christian Union, reprinted in Friends’ Intelligencer 33:43 (Philadelphia: 1876 Dec 16): 679 – 680 [679].

[27] Robert L Anderson, “Indifference to Religion,” Millennial Star 65:4 (1903 Jan 22): 54-55 [55]; “All this [social inequity] is occasioned by the worship of the golden calf.” No author listed, “The Rich and Poor,” The Deseret Weekly 44:20 (1892 May 07): 642 (“social inequity” is my gloss); “[T]he Israelites…would have a golden calf made, which they might worship. …The Stockton Independent… declared that in these United States nothing could be successfully pitted against that potent dollar…. We could hardly believe that any newspaper…would come out so boldly…and avow that money…was the great motive power that impels…action against Mormonism….” No author listed, Salt Lake Telegraph, reprinted in “The Golden God,” no author listed, Millennial Star 29:32 (1867 Aug 10): 502 [502-503].

[28] Matthew Godfrey, Religion, Politics, and Sugar: The Mormon Church, the Federal Government, and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1907-1921 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2007).

[29] Caveat: some polemicists focused on Mormon leaders, who were acknowledged to be intelligent, ambitious, wealthy, and capable, making the critique more sensical.

[30] If people like “us” can be so wrong, then the nation is in imminent peril. Ergo, “those people” are not like “us.” Assuming inherent difference rather than social construction and agency (1) simplifies coping strategies, (2) avoids questions about construction of the “us” position, and (3) avoids fears of becoming “that.”

[31] The formation of American anti-Soviet Union rhetoric in the 1930s through 1950s followed a similar pattern. See the note somewhere up above about the books already being packed.

[32] “Because such birds [California gulls] saved the Mormon pioneers from a plague of grasshoppers, they are regarded with a reverence almost akin to that paid to the sacred cow….” Herald of Gospel Liberty 104 (1912): 1200. The only “holy cow”/Mormon I found pre-1920 came from a Mormon source describing Hinduism. JH Ward, Gospel Philosophy: Showing the Absurdities of Infidelity and the Harmony of the Gospel with Science and History (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1884), 16.

[33] “The necessity for some synthesis thus drives men to set up strange gods…. Moses is lost on the summit; let us make a golden calf. So we have Mormonism and new “religions” by the score.” Social Reform Society, Edinburgh University, “Report for 1885-1886,” Christian Socialist 4:38 (1886 Jul), 5. [On the Adam-God Theory]: “O shame on Brigham Young…. He is as bad as Aaron, who made a golden calf for Israel to worship.” No author listed, “Brigham Young’s God examined and refuted by the Scriptures of truth,” The True Latter Day Saints’ Herald 1:11 (1860 Nov): 259-265 [264]. The interpretation of the golden calf as Baal or some Egyptian fertility god, would have made for a nice smear, but I haven’t identified any such usage. Tangentially, see Paul Y. Hoskisson, “Aaron’s Golden Calf,” FARMS Review 18:1 (2006): 375-387.

[34] Bovine associations appeared in other guises, such as the 1885 poem encouraging authors to “Be not like those Mormon ‘cattle,’ / Give your hero but one wife,” and the 1913 novelist who disregarded such sage counsel and warned a character “to discontinue his rambles with Clara, and not…to shake a red flag in the faces of the Mormon bulls.” A bull in Illinois, with the patriotic foresight to slide into the light on 1893 Jul 04, acquired the name “Mormon.” In what might be described as a case of imperial envy, one William Jarman took the Brigham-Young-as-American-Moses idea to another level:

Brigham could play a tripartite roolv-pooly game of Moses, Aaron, and Joshua: Moses to lead the sorry crowd; Aaron to work Golden Calf affairs; and as the Modern Yankee, Joshua, plunder Mexico, whip the “Greasers,” and “Possess the Land.”

According to the Encyclopedia of 20th-Century American Humor, some called Brigham Young, “The Mormon Bull,” though I have not yet corroborated such usage. Presumably the “bullishness” described his personality or his polygamy. In his prison diary, John D Lee wrote a few lines “as a take off on our diet & My treatment here in Prison”:

Old Mormon Bull, how came you here?
We have tugged and toiled these many years,
we have been cuffed and kicked with sore abuse
and now sent here for penetentiary use.
We both are creatures of some Note.
You are food for Prisoners and I, the scape goat.

No author listed, “Please be Cheerful (Advice to Modern Novelists),” Punch (1866 Dec 01), reprinted in Parodies of the Works of English and American Authors, Vol 2, edited by Walter Hamilton (London: Reeves & Turner, 1885), 11-12; Josiah F Gibbs, Kawich’s Gold Mine: An Historical Narrative of Mining in the Grand Canyon of Colorado and of Love and Adventure Among the Polygamous Mormons of Southern Utah (Salt Lake City: Century Printing Co, 1913), 167. Gibbs had previously written (the unfavorable to Mormons) The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Salt Lake City: Salt Lake Tribune Publishing, 1910); “[B]red and owned by West & Duncan, Windsor, Ill.” Calved July 4, 1893. American Hereford Cattle Breeders’ Association, The American Hereford Record and Hereford Herd Book, vol 14 (Columbus, MO: EW Stephens, 1895), 420; William Jarman, U.S.A., Uncle Sam’s Abscess, or, Hell upon Earth for U.S., Uncle Sam (Exeter, England: H Leduc, 1884), 25; Alleen Pace Nilsen and Don Lee Fred Nilsen, Encyclopedia of 20th-Century American Humor (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 2000), 310; John D Lee, A Mormon Chronicle: The Diaries of John D. Lee, 1848-1876, vol 2, edited by Robert Glass Cleland and Juanita Brooks (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1955), entry for 1875 Oct 29. Punctuation and format partially modernized. [Back to TOC]

Bluebeard asks for a seat in the Senate. He stands with one hand locking the door of his chamber of horrors, and with the other he knocks for admission to the supreme legislative assembly of the foremost Christian republic of all time….

How large is the territory over which the Mormon Bluebeard exercises sway? …[two paragraphs describing the Great Basin] …The American Bluebeard rules over the American Potosi. [1]

The flower genus Caryopteris goes colloquially by “bluebeard” (See Figure 1: C. incana). So far as I know, however, no one compared Mormons to vicious flowers. The name “Bluebeard” comes from a French fairy-tale, “La Barbe-bleue [The Blue-beard],” that Charles Perrault published in 1697. [2] In the story, a young woman marries a rich nobleman despite his cerulean whiskers, which make him “frightful and ugly.” [3] Afterwards, he gives her all the keys, forbids her to enter one particular room, and leaves on (supposed) business. Then, as later made into a nursery rhyme (!)

At last she could no more refrain, and turned the little key,
And looked within, and fainted straight the horrid sight to see;
For there upon the floor was blood, and on the walls were wives,
For Bluebeard first had married them, then cut their throats with knives. [4]

In consternation, the latest wife drops the key on the bloody floor. Magically, the blood is still wet and the key keeps the blood stain, no matter her scouring. [5] Bluebeard returns to check his trap, discerns the breach via the blood-covered key, and attempts to kill yet another wife. She begs for, and he grants, a few minutes to pray, during which time the wife’s sister calls for aid. Not a moment too soon, her brothers arrive and kill Bluebeard, making her, as widow and sole heir, fabulously wealthy.

As with most fairy-tales, Perrault did not invent Bluebeard’s combination of serial monogamy and serial murder. Similar stories come from cultures throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. [6] Details differ, sometimes widely, but despite the variations—or rather, as evidenced by them—the story draws from deep roots in Western and Middle-Eastern culture. Bluebeard’s un-named last wife retreads a path long-travelled by Lot’s un-named wife, Pandora, Psyche, Eve, and other females who gave license to “dangerous” feminine curiosity. [7] Bluebeard joins the angels that visited Lot, Epimetheus, Cupid, Adam, and other males of mythic antiquity who tried and failed to protect a secret.

In the 19^th century, Anglo-Americans frequently told children of Perrault’s blue-follicled tyrant and alluded to him and the nameless wife in conversation. For examples: Joseph Smith, campaigning for president in 1844, charged that “wicked and designing men ha[d] unrobed the Government of its glory” to the extent that “the very name of Congress…is as horrible…as the house of ‘Bluebeard’ is to children. [8] In 1873 the New York Times described a wife-murderer as “A Modern Bluebeard.” [9] Such examples are easily multiplied: to nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans, “Bluebeard” required neither introduction nor explanation. [10]

By the turn of the twentieth century, however, Bluebeard had begun to fade from Anglo-American popular culture; as fairy-tales completed the transition from adult to child entertainment begun two centuries earlier, editors and authors dropped the story from children’s collections.[11] (Whew. I feel better about not knowing the reference.) The story continued, though not always with the “Bluebeard” name, and later in the twentieth century resurged in media for adults.[12]

Figure 2: Engraving of Bluebeard giving key to his wife. Walter Crane, 1874

Now to Mormons: anti-Mormon authors and lectors applied “Bluebeard” to Mormons in at least two ways. First, some authors used “Bluebeard” as a synonym for “polygamist.” In this guise, Brigham Young and Bluebeard often appeared as counterparts, the one poly-wived, the other poly-widowered; the one fantastic, the other real. Such usage usually functioned as maintenance othering rather than polemic.[13] For example:

A long procession of Eastern sight-seekers…pay[s] as much respect to Brigham as to the Grand Turk. …It is truly queer to see that fine Boston belle…shake hands with the bland old Bluebeard, whose honeymoons have been more numerous than her years.[14]

The allusion, though clearly not favorable, does not aggressively assert that Young killed multiple wives. A burlesque operetta, “Bluebeard, or, the Mormon, the Maiden and The Little Militaire,” played the association for both humor and melodrama—and popular success.[15] The following 1886 cartoon (Figure 3), entitled, “Hit ‘em Again,” also demonstrates such half-comic, half-vicious usage:

Figure 3: “Hit ‘Em Again” by D Bac, The Judge, 1886 Jan 09, p1.

The crusading knight, Senator Edmunds, wields the “Edmunds Bill” against the Middle-Eastern “Mormon Bluebeard” with his “Polygamy” club in front of the “Mormon Castle.”[16] Unlike many other representations, here the Mormon is pudgy, old, and befuddled rather than vicious and threatening.

Second, as the opening example shows, anti-Mormons connected the “Bluebeard” story and Mormons directly: Mormons feigned respectability and friendliness but secretly murdered dissidents and abused women in a “secret chamber.” Relatively late (1899), one anti-Mormon brought two monster motifs together, the Mormo and the Bluebeard:

Scholars think and affirm that, the term “Mormon” is of Greek origin. That the word “Mormo,” from which it is derived means, “a monster,” a “female spectre,” “a bugaboo,” a “hobgoblin” — kinder, a raw head and bloody bones affair, with a strong hint of a Blue-Beard attachment.[17]

Despite the anti-Mormon usage, Mormons did not seem to avoid Bluebeard. In addition to the Joseph Smith quote cited above, the uxoricidal maniac appeared in Mormon newspapers and on Mormon stages.[18] Later, some Utahans expressed concern over the story’s appropriateness for children, joining the nation-wide decline in favor for the tale.[19] Further, like many of their contemporaries, some Mormons interpreted the story as a caution against the dangers of feminine curiosity.

The interesting family of Lot should next occupy our attention, and much might be said on the inquisitive propensities of Lot’s wife, who like Fatima in the castle of Blue Beard must indulge just one peep in the forbidden regions—the consequence in both cases resulting in much general good, though apparently disastrous to the chief actresses at the time.[20]

Besides supplementing scripture and derogating polygamists, Bluebeard came to embody stereotyped “Oriental” characteristics; Mormonism also found itself thus situated. Though Perrault set his story in France, an influential staging by George Colman in 1798 set the tale in Turkey with Bluebeard as Abomelique and supporting characters such as Ibrahim and Selim.[21] Many later plays and books followed suit.[22] Even when the artists did not explicitly change the setting, Asiatic stereotypes appeared in the illustrations (see Figures 4, 5, and 7)—sometimes mixing Euro-American and Asian hairstyles and clothing without explanation (Figure 5).[23] The same pattern applied to Mormons.[24] For example, Brigham Young is associated with the “Grand Turk” in one of the quotes above and references to “the bastard Mohammedanism invented by Joseph Smith” appeared frequently.[25] Portraying groups as Oriental or Islamic figured prominently in nineteenth-century othering.[26] Such depictions created rhetorical space between White, Protestant Americans and both Mormons and Muslims. They also mutually impugned the character of both religions and connected American cultural conceptions to global trends, thus countering the universalizing strains in both.[27]

Bluebeard’s appeal as a rhetorical spear derived from the familiarity of the story, its deep cultural roots, and the close fit between it and Mormonism’s perceived character. I have already described the popularity and roots; I now turn to the parallels.

As noted, both Mormons and Bluebeard tended to be imagined as Middle-Eastern. Part of the stereotype was that the Asian was inscrutable and duplicitous. Mormons and Bluebeard fit the stereotype well. Mormonism’s colonizing and missionary success and Bluebeard’s courting success demonstrated to the Protestant mind that both most demonstrate amazing powers of dissimulation—since no one in their right mind would associate with either. In particular, anti-Mormons harped on the contradictions in the Mormon claim of patriotic loyalty simultaneous with their violation of anti-polygamy law. In the 1880s through 1910s many polemicists argued that Mormon promises to discard or to have discarded polygamy as a condition of statehood were made in bad faith. Like Bluebeard or the supposed “Oriental,” the Mormon would smile and promise conformity while “locking the door of his chamber of horrors.”[28]

If modern analysis is to be relied upon, sexuality flows beneath (and sometimes quite near) the surface of a great deal of 19^th-century media. Blue could symbolize inhuman coldness and unnatural feelings while the beard, associated with the goat and Satan, could symbolize natural power, magical power (à la Sampson), bestiality, and sexuality. Therefore, a blue-colored beard connoted unnatural sexuality with possibly mystic powers.[29] Along the same lines, the key could be interpreted as phallic and the entry to the forbidden chamber the gaining of sexual experience, with the indelible blood on the key representing the hymeneal blood on the penis after the irrevocable passing of virginity.[30]

Unlike many other fairy tales, Bluebeard does not end with a marriage and then happily-ever-after; it begins with the marriage, and the after is terrifying. For the male, marriage possibly meant having the female explore parts of his emotional life that he preferred to leave unexamined and having to deal with the generally greater range and lability of female emotion, or at least its expression. The female faced the possibilities of emotional isolation; physical, sexual, and/or emotional violence; and possible (or likely) death in childbirth. The male thus feared the violation of his “secret chamber” and the vexations of a “disobedient” wife trying to assert some control over her own destiny in an asymmetric power arrangement. The female feared the uncertainty represented by the “secret chamber” and the prospect of the various types of violence that the husband had power to inflict upon her, embodied by the bloody corpses.

That sexual deviance, anxiety, and imagery drove much of the non-Mormon response to Mormonism and pervaded the rhetorical treatments is an understatement of “The Awesome Power of Sex” in the nineteenth century.[31] Thus, Bluebeard fit well with the body of anti-Mormon rhetoric.

Another aspect of the Protestant polemic was that Mormonism preyed on gullible women. Newspaper report after newspaper report emphasized and exaggerated the number of female converts to Mormonism while novel after novel portrayed young innocents wooed and betrayed into captivity as a Mormon house-whore. Much of the discussion focused on “freeing” the women and punishing the tyrannical men. The cautionary tale of Bluebeard’s last wife addressed these concerns. If women gave into feminine curiosity they would be led into the “secret chamber” of the Mormon temple where they would discover Mormonism’s true nature. Then, if they disobeyed or tried to escape the Danites would kill them.

If the temple is the secret chamber and the convert woman’s husband is Bluebeard, the strict comparison breaks down, since she is not forbidden to enter the temple. It is only a slight variation, however, to go into the secret chamber and find multiple other wives who were spiritually and emotionally brutalized or dead because of the (presumed) evils of polygamy. If Mormonism itself is the secret chamber, then mainstream America is Bluebeard, forbidding the young woman to enter, but then not punishing her if she escapes. The story might also be applied to non-convert visitors to Utah; the Mormons (Bluebeard) forbid entry to closed Mormon society; those who disobeyed and tried to penetrate the cultural walls with outside education or business or whatever were (supposedly) killed by Danites.

The parallel might also include other characters in Perrault’s version of the story. The female missionaries and crusaders play the role of the sister in the tower calling for help. White, Protestant American males, playing the brothers, were, in the crusaders’ view, to take literal and metaphorical arms to go save their degraded and endangered sisters.[32] The wife’s prayers for deliverance or forgiveness would be answered by the righteously indignant nation, which would punish Mormon men but forgive Mormon women and restore them to health and vitality, as the last wife is saved and forgiven for her disobedience.

Perrault’s closing images of the sister’s marriage to a beau who had “loved her a long while” illustrates another point of compatibility. Perrault has the sisters marrying for love, contrary to the typical necessity, at that time, of marrying for money or politics. Thus, the Bluebeard story elevates a conception of companionate marriage and romantic love against the conventional form.[33] The Mormon case parallels in that romantic love is elevated above the Mormon norm (loosely defined) of marriage as a spiritual obligation, an investment in eternity with the primary emotional attachment not between husband and wife and lacking the tumultuous and spirit-offending passions of mainstream relationships. For all its brutality, the story of Bluebeard, in the end, elevates romantic monogamy over violence and much-marrying—two signal aspects of the assigned Mormon identity.

I am reasonably confident that nineteenth-century readers and tale-tellers and polemicists did not examine the story as a point-by-point analogy for the Mormon case. We have already seen how many authors used Bluebeard as a simple stand-in for polygamy, never mind his monogamy. However, with the story’s cultural roots and familiarity combined with Victorian sexual anxiety, they didn’t need to. It resonated without analysis, tapping into fears and horrors felt since childhood. It was a remarkable rhetorical tool, bringing together various elements from contemporary culture and placing Mormonism firmly outside the realm of normalcy, decency, and capability of good-faith negotiation. Mormonism, like Bluebeard, called for nothing less than annihilation.

Figure 4: Horace E Scudder, editor, The Children’s Book: A Collection of the Best and Most Famous Stories and Poems in the English Language (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company: 1883), 115.

Figure 5: Josiah Gilbert Holland, Bitter-sweet: A Poem, illustrated by Elias James Whitney (New York: Charles Scribner, 1867), 173.

Figure 6: Gustave Doré engraving of Bluebeard deliving the key and prohibition, Les Contes de Perrault, dessins par Gustave Doré (Paris: Didot et Hetzel, 1862), Wikipedia.

Figure 7: Engraving of Bluebeard about to kill his wife, the sister on the tower, and the brothers rushing to the rescue. By Clouzier from original (Perrault, 1697; Wikipedia). Note the curved blade, possibly suggesting a scimitar, but perhaps just a cutlass.

Cook reused these ideas and words. For example: [T]here exists in the Basin States and Territories an American Bluebeard’s chamber, full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. For twenty-five years the American Bluebeard has been standing with one hand on the locked door of his chamber of horrors, and with the other has been knocking for admittance to a place among the legislators of the foremost Christian republic on earth. Bluebeard wants a seat in the Senate. He is becoming importunate. [¶]As to the pest-house ruled by the American Bluebeard, Mr. Beecher says, ‘Hands off.’ President Arthur says, ‘Hands on.’ [Applause.]” Joseph Cook, lecture in Boston, 1884 Feb 11, reprinted in “Joseph Cook on the Plan Recommended by President Arthur,” “Reorganization of the Legislative Power of Utah Territory,” 48^th Congress, 1^st Session, House of Representatives, Report 1351, part 2, p24 in Speech of Hon. Joseph D. Taylor, of Ohio in the House of Representatives, Friday, February 1, 1884 (Washington: no publisher listed, 1884); “[T]the Mormon Bluebeard has Congressional aspirations already.” Joseph Cook, quoted in No author listed, “Mormon Pointers,” Home Mission Monthly 5 no 10 (1891 Aug):221-2.

[2] In the original the title is written, La Barbe-bleüe. Charles Perrault, Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé (Paris: Barbin, 1697).

[3] “frightful and ugly” = si laid et si terrible. Perrault (1697). The translator of the most frequent used English translation is unknown. The first instance I’ve found comes from 1836, but the editor explicitly indicates that he used a previous translation. (That is, he identifies titles in the table of contents that had been “expressly translated for this work” and “Blue Beard” was not one of them.) John Smith, ed., The Fairybook: Illustrated with Cuts on Wood, JA Adams, illustrator (New York: Harper, 1836), 25-32. In Amusing Prose Chap-Books, Chiefly of the Last Century (London: Hamilton, Adams; Glasgow: Thomas D Morison, 1889), Robert Hayes Cunningham included the common English translation but without indicating which chapbook(s) or date(s), though, presumably they came from the 18^th century. The first significant English translation seems to have come from one Robert Samber in Charles Perrault and Marie-Jeanne, L’Héritier de Villandon, Histories, or tales of past times, Robert Samber, translator (London: J Pote and R Montagu, 1729). The text I quote comes from Robert Ford, Children’s Rhymes, Children’s Games, Children’s Songs, Children’s Stories: A Book for Bairns and Big Folk, 2^nd edition, illustrated by Kate T. Hill (Paisley, Scotland: Alexander Gardner, 1904), 183-90 [183].

[4] The versifier is anonymous. The text accompanied the engravings of Walter Crane in The Bluebeard Picture Book (London: Routledge, 1875) but I actually retrieved the images from The Sleeping Beauty Picture Book: Containing The Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard, The Baby’s Own Alphabet (New York: Dodd, Mead, no date).

In a sequel spoof, WM Thackeray has the naïve surviving wife remember Bluebeard fondly, explaining that “the inconsolable husband” had had the wives’ bodies embalmed “in order that on this side of the grave he might never part from them.” As proof of innocence she cites his written expressions of grief when his wives died of such maladies as a “sore throat” and a “complaint of the head and shoulders.” William Makepeace Thackeray, “Bluebeard’s Ghost,” Early and Late Papers Hitherto Uncollected (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 63-94 [65-6].

[5] In Perrault, she finds mutilated bodies hanging on the wall; in other versions she finds various arrangements for preservation and presentation, from carefully mounted and labeled heads to mutilated corpses piled without order.

[6] Maria Tatar, Secrets beyond the Door, The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 14. The first chapter is available at the Princeton Press website.

[7] In Perrault, the wife is never identified by name, though her sister is (Anne); in later versions the wife is often named Fatima. Lot’s wife is not identified by name before the eighth century, CE. In that period, Jewish scholars posited that her name was “Irit” or “Idit” or, with less scholarly authority, “Ildreth.”

[8] Joseph Smith, “Joe Smith’s Position,” dated 1844 Feb 07, New York Herald 10 no 138 (1844 May 17). The text reappeared occasionally in Mormon periodicals, e.g., Deseret News 1851 Aug 19, vol 1 no 39 p3.

[9] No author listed, “A Modern Bluebeard,” New York Times, 1873 Jun 20, p4. “Fairy-tale anthologies from the nineteenth century suggest that the story of Bluebeard was once at least as prominent a tale type as ‘Beauty and the Beast.’” Tatar, Secrets, 13, 54-5. The story outline also found frequent expression in such guises as Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) and The Phantom of the Opera (Gaston Leroux), with their mysterious males, secret chambers, and in Eyre‘s case, still living wife.

[10] More than twenty theatrical or operatic “Bluebeard” adaptations played in the US and UK during the century. William Davenport Adams, “Blue Beard,” A Dictionary of the Drama, Volume 1, A-G, (Boston: JB Lippincott, 1904), 176-177. Examples of books include: JR Planché, translator, Four and Twenty Fairy-Tales: Selected from Those of Perrault, and Other Popular Writers (London, New York: Routledge, 1858), 3-7; Josiah Gilbert Holland, Bitter-sweet: A Poem, illustrated by Elias James Whitney (New York: Charles Scribner, 1867), 170-190; Horace E Scudder, editor, The Children’s Book: A Collection of the Best and Most Famous Stories and Poems in the English Language (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company: 1883), 114-7; Andrew Lang, editor, Perrault’s Popular Tales (Oxford: Clarendon, 1888); Author of “Zit and Xoe” [Henry Curwen], Lady Bluebeard: A Novel (New York: Harper, 1889); Charles Perrault, The Story of Bluebeard, illustrated by Joseph E Southall (London: Lawrence and Bullen; Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1895).

[11] Tatar, Secrets, 13. Near the turn of the twentieth century one Robert Ford lamented the passing of such tales. He recalled that “they were so familiar fifty years ago that the books on occasions could be dispensed with, and the elder members of families would recite the stories from memory for the delectation of the younger fry….” He also conceded, however, that the stories were “not yet unknown, though familiar to city children in the present generation mainly in their variegated and fantastic Christmas pantomime form.” Robert Ford, Children’s Rhymes, Children’s Games, Children’s Songs, Children’s Stories: A Book for Bairns and Big Folk, 2^nd edition, illustrated by Kate T. Hill (Paisley, Scotland: Alexander Gardner, 1904), 6. The decline seemed to be grassroots at first; the story did not disappear from children’s books until the mid-twentieth century.

[12] Though “Bluebeard” declined as a name, the motif found and finds frequent expression in twentieth- and twenty-first-century media. See Tatar, Secrets; Wikipedia’s “List of adaptations of Bluebeard” entry [accessed 2009 Jul 25]; and (for a concise overview) Amy Lee Bell, “Tall, Dark and Deadly: The Fairytale Bluebeard as Icon of Evil in Modern Story,” 8th Global Conference Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, 2007 Mar 19-23, Salzburg, Austria. Perhaps the most famous of 20^th-century adaptations  is the opera “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle” [Hungarian: A kékszakállú herceg vára] by Béla Bartók with libretto by Béla Balázs, first performed, 1918.

[13] “If he goes on as he has begun, he hardly can fail to become either a Blue Beard or a Brigham Young.” Review of Trotty’s Wedding Tour by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Boston: Osgood, 1873) in Mary Mapes Dodge, ed., “Books for Boys and Girls,” St. Nicholas 1 no 3 (1874 Jan): 174; “John, succeeded as third Baronet. He is called in the family Sir John Bluebeard, because he had four wives, not of course at once, like Brigham Young.” Walter Riddell Carre, edited by James Tait, Border Memories, Or, Sketches of Prominent Men and Women of the Border (Edinburgh: James Thin, 1876), 189; “Bluebeard is melodrama in the sphere of imagination just as Brigham Young is melodrama in the region of actuality.” William Patrick O’Ryan, The Plough and the Cross: A Story of New Ireland (Point Loma, CA: Aryan Theosophical Press, 1910; reprinted from The Irish Nation, 1910), 266.

[14] George Alfred Townsend, The Mormon Trials at Salt Lake City (New York: American News Company, 1871) p7.

[15] HB Farnie adapted the operetta from Jacques Offenbach’s opera, “Bluebeard” but, while Offenbach followed the traditional story, Farnie added Mormons and Chinese. It played more than 420 times in the US in the 1870s. William Davenport Adams, “Blue Beard,” A Dictionary of the Drama, Volume 1, A-G, (Boston: JB Lippincott, 1904), 176-177; Megan Sanborn Jones, Performing American Identity in Anti-Mormon Melodrama (New York: Routledge, 2009), 149-50; Jacques Offenbach, composer, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, librettists, “Barbe-Bleue [Bluebeard],” [parallel French and English text], translated by Charles Lamb Kenney (London: J Mitchell, Royal Library, 1869). First performed in Paris, 1866 Feb 05; performed in New York in 1870.

[16] Many polemicists portrayed Mormons (and other targets) as Middle-Eastern; more on “Orientalization” below. D Mac, “Hit ‘Em Again,” The Judge, 1886 Jan 09, p1. For discussion see Gary L. Bunker and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Graphic Image, 1834-1914: Cartoons, Caricatures, and Illustrations (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983), 118-120.

[17] RB Neal, “Anti-Mormon Tracts, — No. 5. The Stick of Ephraim vs. The Bible of the Western Continent; or The Manuscript Found, vs The Book of Mormon. Part II” (pamphlet; Grayson, KY, 1899), 4. The specific demon Mormo and the generic demons called mormos were explicitly female and attacked children. The specific demon, Mormo, started out human but killed and ate her own children. There is, thus, a degree of analogy between Mormo and Bluebeard, but I think Neal overplays his etymology; see my earlier post on Mormo.

[18] [Two women conversing in a short story; the not-quoted thinks poorly of the quoted's husband: "...I was busy planning a little unromantic hot supper for my Blue Beard---especially a lemon pudding, of which I knew he was particularly fond." No author listed, "Miscellaneous: A Fire-side Story (concluded)," Deseret News, 1867 Feb 20, p3; Program for concert includes "Shadow Pantomime, 'Blue Beard.'" No author listed, "Salmagundi Concert," The Daily Enquirer 4 no 142, Provo City, UT, 1891 Nov 16, p1. "One of the first dramatic companies [in Cache County]…performed in the old log school building know as the Old Hall, and they played, “Bluebeard,” “Rent Day,” “The Bar Room,” “Ben Bolt” and “Rough Diamond.” At first they used a bedspread for a curtain on the stage.” DE Robinson, MR Hovey, Frank Daines, An Early History of Cache County (Logan, UT: Logan Chamber of Commerce, 1923) as reproduced on website prepared by Rodney J Sorensen from typescript prepared by Ellen Bickmore for the Historic Records Survey, Federal Writers Projects, Works Progress Administration, 1936 Dec.

[19] “The old question has been lately asked anew, Why fill the infant mind with images of cruelty and horror? …Why permit the hoary murderer Blue Beard to terrify the young before in historical sequence they reach Henry VIII, in no extenuating page of Freude, but as the grisly murderer and defender of the faith of the older annals?” No author listed, “An Old Questions Asked Anew,” The Daily Enquirer 6 no 86, Provo City, UT, 1892 Sep 12, p4. “I am asked if I am in favor of telling children fairy stories. …I do not think it wise or necessary to tell such things to the children of Latter-day Saints. …What if there is a moral in the tale of Bluebeard! That is small excuse for making every child a coward and filling hours of happy childhood with grim visions of horror and bloody strife.” Frances M Richards, “In Woman’s Sphere,” Deseret News 1892 Nov 12, p25.

[20] A. B. C’s, “Women of the Bible,” lecture delivered in Manti, UT, 1889 Dec 06, as printed in The Women’s Exponent 18 no 17 (1890 Feb 01): 136.

[21] George Colman, “Blue-beard, or Female Curiosity!” (London: Cadhill and Davies, 1798).

[22] George Colman, Blue-beard, or Female Curiosity! Stage-play (London: Cadhill and Davies, 1798); Josiah Gilbert Holland, Bitter-sweet: A Poem, illustrated by Elias James Whitney (New York: Charles Scribner, 1867), 170-190; Horace E Scudder, editor, The Children’s Book: A Collection of the Best and Most Famous Stories and Poems in the English Language (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company: 1883), 114-7; Lady Bluebeard: A Novel by the author of “Zit and Xoe” [Henry Curwen] (New York: Harper, 1889). Note particularly the illustrations in Scudder (115) and Holland (173).

[23] Horace E Scudder, editor, The Children’s Book: A Collection of the Best and Most Famous Stories and Poems in the English Language (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company: 1883), 114-7 [115]; Josiah Gilbert Holland, Bitter-sweet: A Poem, illustrated by Elias James Whitney (New York: Charles Scribner, 1867), 170-190 [173].

[24] Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

[25] George Alfred Townsend, The Mormon Trials at Salt Lake City (New York: American News Company, 1871) p7. Leonard Bacon, “What Are You Going to Do About It,” in Jennie Anderson Froiseth, ed., The Women of Mormonism, or The Story of Polygamy as Told by the Victims Themselves (Detroit, MI: CGG Paine, 1887, orig. 1881), 303-11 [305-6].

[26] “In the two decades before P. T. Barnum’s death in 1891 the street processions of his hippodromes and circuses annually titillated hundreds of thousands of rural and urban Americans with glimpses of an exotic Orient. By the end of the period, the parades included wild Moors, herds of elephants, and pony floats representing Bluebeard and Sinbad.” Bluford Adams, “‘A Stupendous Mirror of Departed Empires’: The Barnum Hippodromes and Circuses, 1874-1891,” American Literary History 8 (1996): 34.

[27] Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 185-218. In addition to the Orientalism, Bluebeard also seems to have made at least one appearance in blackface. Morton Williams, “Blue Beard in a Black Skin: An Operatic Absurdity,” performed in Norwich, 1875 Jun, listed in William Davenport Adams, “Blue Beard,” A Dictionary of the Drama, Volume 1, A-G, (Boston: JB Lippincott, 1904), 176-177.

[28] Joseph Cook, “Disloyal Mormonism,” speech, Boston, in Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, The Great West: Its Attractions and Resources… (Bloominton, IL: Charles R Brodix, 1880). 330-1.

[29] Heidi Anne Heiner, “The Annotated Bluebeard,” SurLaLuneFairyTales.com, 1998 Dec, updated 2007 Jun 28; Tatar, Secrets, 18-20; Marina Warner, “Bluebeard’s Brides: The Dream of the Blue Chamber,” Grand Street 9 no 1 (1989 Autumn): 121-130.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Charles A. Cannon, “The Awesome Power of Sex: The Polemical Campaign against Mormon Polygamy,” The Pacific Historical Review 43 no 1 (1974 Feb): 61-82.

[32] Tatar, Secrets, 60-63.

[33] Heiner, “The Annotated Bluebeard.”

[The Chinch bug] made its appearance there simultaneously with the establishment of the Mormons at Nauvoo (1840-1844 [sic]) and many ignorant people firmly believed they were introduced there by these strange religionists, and ‘Mormon lice’ became the name by which they were currently designated, through that district. When we have such instance of credulity and ignorance of our own day and generation, let us not smile at our patriotic grandsires for deeming that the Hessian soldiers were breeding and shaking off pestilent vermin and scattering them over the country wherever they marched.” [2]

The much-loathed Hessians appeared in many of the citations.

In parts of North Carolina it receives the name, Hessian Fly or, Hessian Bug, on the supposition that they were left in the country by German soldiers, as they were first observed after a detachment had passed through. In Illinois, they were similarly called Mormon lice, upon the supposition that the Mormons were somehow responsible for them. [3]

Different circumstance, different bugbear—othering is nothing if not plastic. I find interesting here the construction of an elitist identity: the writers smugly assert their intellectual superiority to “strange religionists,” previous generations, and plebeians. Such constructions differ from many of the others we’ve been discussing in that the construction distinguishes the “rational” from the “credulous,” rather than the moral from the immoral. For Mormons, mere “strangeness” indicated, at least rhetorically, a much greater degree of social acceptance. The growing authority of Science in the late nineteenth century changed/coincided with (re)constructions of Mormon identity. For an increasing part of the population, Mormonism became “just another irrational religion.” [4] Clean cities and racial homogeneity invited admiration in the new paradigm. Mormon industry had always inspired favor (or envy or fear), so approval did not so much increase as the loathing of a “moral abomination” decreased. Mormons shifted from evil non-Whites who happened to be good—and therefore dangerous—colonizers to good, White—and therefore useful—colonizers who happened to hold weird ideas. But all that was still mostly in the future. By the 1890s the sobriquet “Mormon lice” had mostly petered out even though Mormons and B. leucopterus both still held national attention. [5] The timing requires explanation: the second-relic-of-barbarism 1880s were hardly the decade for negative Mormon references to die off. Possible factors include the fact that the name never gained more than local traction; the chinch bug’s wide range and previously established name obscured the new name; and Mormons didn’t implicate it in a faith-promoting story. [6] Like most common names, “Mormon lice” lacked taxonomic precision and some folks might have applied the name to bed bugs (Cimex lectularius). I also found one reference to “Mormon bed-bugs”:

Fleas are, in western phrase, ‘tolerable bad,’ but bed bugs are intolerable; both in numbers and voracity those of Utah beat the world, particularly in the country towns, and among the poorer classes of foreign-born Mormons. In certain settlements their ravage is incredible, and Mormon bed-bugs seem as much worse than others as their human companions. Like the latter, too, they seem to regard the Gentile as fair prey. [7]

The author scores big points in nativist pinball, hitting almost all of the standard issues: overwhelming numbers, individual ferocity, poverty, foreign-ness, and lack of decency. In particular, the dig undermined one of the Mormons’ most (/the only) successful claims, pioneering excellence. If bed bugs vexed, Mormons hadn’t been as successful as claimed in civilizing the frontier. [8]

At any rate, the big issue with Mormon lice is, of course, the nits. Haun’s Mill Massacre participant William Reynolds famously explained his execution of a child with, “Nits will make lice, and if he had lived he would have become a Mormon.” [9] As Paul Reeve demonstrated at MHA this year, the “nits make lice” idea surfaced during conflicts with Native American Peoples from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century. [10] However, I have not yet found any documentary evidence connecting Reynolds’s nits with “Mormon lice.”

Even without the possible equation with Indians, “Mormon lice” keyed on a fundamental assumption for most White, nineteenth-century Americans: lice signified poverty, disgrace, uncleanness, and moral degradation. “Lice-ridden” almost always made up part of the assigned identity for Blacks, immigrants, and the poor. Thus, even though I find no direct evidence changing “Mormon lice” from a troponym to a charactonym, I think it highly likely that it connoted disreputability and performed maintenance othering. [11]

The standard caveats: When I write “The earliest instance…,” etc, the “that I’ve found to date” is implied. When I write something like “Most of the Mormon records used…”I am reporting a non-quantitative, subjective impression (unless otherwise stated).

Related Posts: Twin Barbarians 1: Mormon Crickets
What Put the “Mormon” in “Mormon Fly” Might Not Go Well with Breakfast
All God’s Creatures—Including Mormos, the Other Mormons
A Preliminary History of the Phrase “Happy Valley”