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  • A Foreign Kingdom: Mormons and Polygamy in American Political Culture 1852–1890 by Christine Talbot
  • Susanna Morrill
A Foreign Kingdom: Mormons and Polygamy in American Political Culture 1852–1890. By Christine Talbot. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Pp. 262. $85.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper).

Christine Talbot offers readers a thoughtful, well-researched, and revealing cultural history of nineteenth-century conversations about Mormon polygamy. Talbot compares and contrasts the Mormon cultural understanding of polygamy and the family with that of white Protestants from the Northeast, who at the time were the political and economic elite of the country. She argues that the Mormon practice of plural marriage created a “contest over the very meaning of Americanness,” a contest that focused on “gender, family, and the nature of citizenship” (1). Specifically, she suggests that in their practice of polygamy, Mormons “troubled the public/private divide” (53); their reordering of marital relations presented a challenge to dominant Protestant cultural assumptions that valorized the nuclear, monogamous, heterosexual family as the social institution that created moral men and women who could function effectively as citizens of a democratic republic. Thus, Talbot uses the Mormon (or Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or LDS) case study to demonstrate how present-day state and federal marriage laws grew out of larger cultural assumptions. Though she was writing before the recent Supreme Court decision to legalize gay marriage, Talbot provides context for present-day discussions about these laws and assumptions, which remain the focus of public conversation about the legality of same-sex marriage and of modern-day polygamy. [End Page 213]

Talbot writes clearly and provides useful cultural and historical background for her argument, making the book eminently readable for nonexperts. The primary sources she analyzes—periodical articles, popular fiction, editorial cartoons—are lively and accessible. For these reasons, the book would work well in upper-level undergraduate courses. In the first three chapters, Talbot outlines the Mormon cultural understanding of the family and the family’s relationship to the public and political spheres. In Mormon theology, individuals are saved and, ideally, ultimately divinized within family units that extend back to Adam and Eve. The practice of polygamy was thought to allow members to extend these connections into densely intertwined familial networks. This theology profoundly shaped Mormon political philosophy. “Ideally,” Talbot explains, “the practice of polygamy united God’s people and remade Mormon society as a broad, community-wide family that was also a political community—God’s polity” (40). By dissolving the public/private divide within the Mormon community and replacing it with a Mormon/non-Mormon divide, LDS members challenged the idea of private property and allowed Mormon women to be active in the public sphere. Using freedom of religion as their justification, elite Mormon women publicly and vehemently defended their right to vote (granted to them in the state of Utah in 1870), as well as their right to practice polygamy.

In the second half of the book, Talbot effectively illuminates how this Mormon understanding of the relationship between family and citizenship profoundly disturbed Protestant elites. Antipolygamists believed that the monogamous nuclear family allowed men to form deep emotional ties with their wives, who in turn used this influence over men to create moral homes, moral children, and thus moral citizens. By erasing the public/private divide and diluting the romantic bond between men and women, anti-Mormons believed that polygamy created autocratic, chaotic families and produced men and women who were liable to fall under the sway of tyranny, who were not moral, who could not function in a democracy, and who therefore should not be allowed the privileges of citizenship. Anti-Mormons used a multipronged argument against polygamy, arguing that people joined Mormonism under coercion and that women could not freely consent to polygamous marriages. Describing the argument, Talbot writes: “Men driven by passion and power, men who exercised tyranny in the home, were unfit to participate in the fraternity of the American social contract” (122). She explores how anti-Mormons fanned fear of Mormons by associating the religion with “Oriental” Islam and by depicting European Mormon immigrants as “unevolved barbarians” (133). In their...

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