Saints on the border: plural marriage, power, and the remaking of the Latter-Day Saints on the U.S.-Mexico border, 1885-1925

This dissertation examines how Latter-day Saints reconciled themselves to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’s renunciation of plural marriage during the post-Manifesto period. For much of the twentieth century, the prevailing consensus among scholars of Mormonism was that after a protracted legal struggle over plural marriage–culminating in the federal antipolygamy campaigns of the 1880s–the Church unequivocally renounced plural marriage with the Woodruff Manifesto of 1890. While a growing number of scholars have begun to examine post-Manifesto plural marriage in the United States, 1890 remains a widely accepted marker that signaled the end to the Church’s official participation in plural marriage and marks the beginning of Latter-day Saints’ largely successful assimilation into the American body politic, a process that was concretized with Utah statehood in 1896. This dissertation fundamentally disrupts that narrative. It argues that the battle over plural marriage extended beyond the nation’s borders and persisted well into the 20th century. During the height of the U.S. antipolygamy raids, the Church sought out land south of the U.S.-Mexico border as a refuge for polygamous families fleeing criminal prosecution. After the Woodruff Manifesto, nine Mormon “colonies” in Sonora and Chihuahua operated as a liminal space where Latter-day Saints ensured plural marriage’s survival beyond the punitive reach of the U.S. government. Between 1890 and 1904, those settlements became the nucleus of a transnational network wherein church leaders in Salt Lake City continued to sanction and perform polygamous unions for their brethren in Mexico, thereby observing the word--if not the spirit--of the Woodruff Manifesto. That network relied upon covert methods wherein Latter-day Saints could enter into polygamous unions without attracting the scrutiny of non-Mormons to church leaders or themselves. When the 1904-1907 U.S. Senate hearings over the seating of the Mormon Senator-elect Reed Smoot renewed the nation’s interest in the intimate lives of Latter-day Saints, uncovered cases of post-Manifesto plural marriages performed in Mexico gave material credence to ongoing rumors that the Church had violated the Woodruff Manifesto and flouted mainstream American sexual mores. In the wake of the political fallout from the hearings, the Church issued a final renunciation of plural marriage with a “Second” Manifesto in 1904 that renounced plural marriage within and beyond U.S. borders. However, church leaders found that a growing number of Mexico colonists--who considered the practice the bedrock of their community and the singular assurance of their spiritual exaltation--struggled to convert themselves to the Church’s new commitment to monogamy. To the consternation of Church leaders, some Mexico colonists rejected the 1904 declaration outright and claimed the marital authority once reserved for the highest-ranking Latter-day Saints for themselves. Over the next decade, the Mexico settlements became the arena for a fraught internal conflict over marital and spiritual authority. By the 1920s, excommunications and disciplinary proceedings within the Church’s ecclesiastical courts enabled the Church to regain control over marital practices but also produced lingering trauma for polygamous families forced to carve a new place for themselves within a modern and monogamous Church. By extending both the geographic scope and the periodization of Mormon plural marriage, this dissertation recovers transnational spaces as an important dimension of analysis for the polygamous Mormon experience. By reframing the decline of polygamy as an internal, inter-Mormon conflict, it makes a substantive contribution to historiography that underscores Latter-day Saints’ uneven and painful transition to monogamy.