_The American Spirit Among the Mormons_
Both the Herr Director and his wife had a strange desire to see the
Mormons. They explained it by saying that besides the Indians whom they
had as yet not seen, and the Negroes whom they had seen everywhere, they
always thought of the Mormons as most American, that is most unlike
other people.
The Rocky Mountains, as I had expected, did not impress them. From the
car window they seemed more like elevated plains, with here and there a
restless chain of hills in the distance.
"As restless as the American people," quoth the Herr Director. "Your
plains and your mountains seem to be fighting with each other."
I hoped that the plains would win the fight and pointed out another,
more visible struggle--that of man with the desert. I admitted that the
Rocky Mountains which he had thus far seen were uninteresting from the
scenic standpoint, especially as compared with the beauty of the Alps,
those snow-capped mountains with meadows to the timber line, their
picturesque villages and herders' huts all as trim and neat and finished
as the carving one buys in Interlaken or Luzerne.
From the human standpoint, the Rockies are infinitely more interesting,
for there the elemental struggle is still going on. A giant race is
taming tumultuous rivers, and forcing their waters through flumes and
tunnels into mighty reservoirs on the mountainsides and in the valleys.
No indolent, unaspiring, uninventive, docile people could survive in the
Rockies.
In common with many Americans, my guests believed that this matter of
irrigation is as easy as turning water from a faucet into a basin; and
that all a man has to do is to drop his seed into the ground and watch
it grow. I showed them farms, desolate and forbidding, which men had to
level or lift, ditch and plow and harrow; a back-breaking, often a
heart-breaking task. In such an environment they built shacks which only
accentuated the loneliness--where women lived and children were born,
where hopes were cherished and God was worshipped.
It was an Old Testament environment, the wilderness. Compared with these
pioneers the Israelites had an easy task. They sent spies into the
Promised Land where they found and from which they brought back grapes
and pomegranates; but to stay in the wilderness, to drive back the
drought inch by inch, to kill coyotes and rattlesnakes one by one, to
contend with claim jumpers, real estate agents, water right privileges
and unscrupulous lawyers, and then raise grapes and pomegranates,
families, churches, schools and colleges--that seems to me the greater
and more heroic task. And it was done by men with the courage of
soldiers and the vision of prophets, who turned that land of drought,
alkali and sage-brush into one "flowing with milk and honey." Because in
a certain portion of that desert those who were the pioneers and
performed those tasks were Mormons, takes nothing from the glory of the
achievement.
As we neared Salt Lake City the Frau Directorin looked into every house,
eager to detect the numerous wives whom she expected to see surrounding
one man; while the Herr Director marvelled at the beauty of the vast
Salt Lake valley which, with its poplars and mountains and its
intensively cultivated farms, reminded him of Lombardy, that beautiful
stretch of country along the railway from Milan to Boulogna.
Salt Lake City is sufficiently different from other cities we had seen
to arouse interest; but as in Rome the Vatican overshadows everything
else, so here the Temple and the Tabernacle hold one's attention, and
work upon one's imagination.
We had scarcely put ourselves to rights in our rooms at the Hotel Utah,
as pretentious and comfortable as any in the country, before we were
out on the streets, looking for Mormons. There is a fairly defined type
and I thought I knew it, for I have lectured before Mormon audiences;
but out upon the busy city streets it was quite impossible for me to
gratify the curiosity of the Frau Directorin by pointing them out to
her. I did tell her that a third of the population was non-Mormon and
she looked curiously at two out of every three persons we met without,
however, being able to say definitely that she had seen a real, live
specimen.
Not wishing to join the crowd of tourists who were taken in relays
through the Tabernacle and other buildings open to the curious among the
Gentiles, we walked through the park, and stopping before the monument
to Joseph Smith I took the opportunity to enlighten my guests upon the
history of that singular personality, and the church of which he was the
founder.
Evidently my remarks were overheard, and before I realized it I was in a
discussion of Mormon doctrines with a woman, a zealous defender of her
faith, whose religious zeal shone out of her face, which was homely
enough to need this adornment to save it from repulsive ugliness.
Of course she believed implicitly in the Book of Mormon, the plates of
which were found, and translated from a language which the best informed
philologists have never known to exist; in a God who has body, parts and
passions, in spirits which fill Heaven, and clamor to be born onto the
Earth, in the baptism for the dead, and in that strange doctrine, that
no woman can be saved without being sealed to a man, upon which the
practice of polygamy rested.
The Herr Director did not quite understand, and I had to explain each of
these dogmas as well as I could, and then the Frau Directorin, not
understanding anything, begged to be told about the one thing in which
she was primarily interested, their belief in regard to marriage. I
asked the lady to explain this doctrine of the Mormons, to which she
replied that they are not Mormons, but Latter Day Saints. She was indeed
a saint, for she was not offended by our curiosity, nor the lack of
seriousness with which we were discussing the subject.
She addressed the Frau Directorin: "You are married to your husband."
The Frau Directorin understood and nodded comprehendingly; "but," the
saint continued, "you are married to him only for time."
"No, no, not for a time, not for a time!" the Frau Directorin cried,
clinging to her husband, who had jokingly threatened that when they
reached Utah he would improve the occasion and double his blessings.
"You could not be married to him any other way unless you are sealed
according to our rites; we alone marry for eternity."
"Oh!" said the facetious Herr Director, "you believe in eternal
punishment." When I translated that to the Frau Directorin she slapped
him playfully.
He asked our guide how many wives he could marry if he became a Latter
Day Saint and she said there would be no limit to the wives he could
have sealed to him; but according to the latest ruling of the church and
in conformity with the laws of the United States, only one to live with
here upon the earth; so he decided to "bear the ills he had," and not
"fly to others that he knew not of."
The saint could not have expected her teaching to take root in soil so
shallow, but she determined to sow a few more seeds, and showed us the
interior of the Tabernacle with its "largest organ in the world and its
perfect acoustics." The Frau Directorin tried her charming voice and
sang, much to the delight of the saint, who confessed to three consuming
passions. She loved to sing better than to eat, next in order came
dancing, which seems to be a specialty among Mormons, and evidently does
not interfere with their piety, and third, that of saving feminine souls
from destruction, on account of their unmarried state. To satisfy this
last passion she has had ten thousand of her female ancestors married to
well-known Mormons. To accomplish this, she had her genealogical tree
traced back to prehistoric times, and had spent her fortune upon that
pious extravagance. She told us that she was a plural wife, and living
with her husband merely in the celestial relationship: but she believed
polygamy to be in harmony with the will of God, and that the women as a
whole favor it.
As we returned to our hotel, the Frau Directorin amused herself by
asking each child she met: "How much brothers and sisters you are?" I
was profoundly thankful she did not stop the men to ask them about the
number of their wives.
Having promised her that I would introduce her to a real, live Mormon
who as yet had only one wife, she could hardly wait until dinner, to
which I had invited my Mormon acquaintance. He proved to be a very
normal sort of man whose face betrayed his European peasant ancestry,
his father and mother having emigrated from Switzerland, lured across by
the promise of land, and an all but perfect Zion. They had passed
through every hardship of the early persecutions, and the march across
the plains and mountains. He himself had grown up in the martyrs' faith,
which remained unshaken until he was sent to college.
Although his teachers were Mormons they could not explain away all the
inconsistencies of Mormon history and belief; doubts assailed him, and
when in due course he became a missionary and it fell to his lot to go
to Europe, instead of making converts, he became one. The six years
abroad were spent in the study of history, and, applying the methods to
his own church and its Book of Mormon, he began to doubt, and is a
doubter still. Yet so strong were the ties that bound him that he did
not formally sever his connection with the church, and unless he is
ejected from that communion he will doubtless remain within its fold.
He belongs to an increasingly large group of young Mormons who, while
they themselves have lost faith in the church and its doctrines, believe
that they must remain loyal to those whose belief is still unshaken,
help them to discard the crudest elements of their doctrine and so
gradually democratize the whole institution.
The growth of the church has been checked and the accession of foreign
converts has almost ceased, due to the prohibition of polygamy which
was a lure to the evil minded, and due also to the fact that immigration
is not being encouraged.
Mormonism would have continued to grow in alarming proportions if the
missionaries were still offering a husband, or a part of one, to every
woman, and to every man as many wives as he cared to take unto himself.
Within the church two forces are working towards its liberalization. The
influence of a strong, Gentile population, and the school; while neither
of them will destroy Mormonism, our informant believed that ultimately
it will prove no more formidable or dangerous to the nation than any
other religious denomination, whose government is strongly centralized.
After dinner he took us to his own home, and either from a recently
acquired habit, or from renewed curiosity, the Frau Directorin asked the
little son of the house, "How much brothers and sisters you are?" and I
am not sure she was convinced that his wife whom he introduced to us
was the only wife he had.
He was good enough to insist upon taking us into the country in his
machine to call on his father, his mother having died some years before;
which, however, according to Mormon usage of bygone days did not leave
the old man a widower.
His gnarled, wrinkled face shone when we greeted him in his native
tongue, and it was as pleasant as it was instructive to hear him tell of
the emigration of his people from Switzerland to Missouri, of the stormy
days there, the struggles against infuriated mobs, the long, dangerous
journey across the desert, and the pioneer days in Utah where he had
acquired lands, sheep and oxen, wives and children, in true Old
Testament fashion.