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Homeward to Zion
- University of Nevada Press
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: : 70 : : With a new baby on the way, we couldn’t stay in the gardener’s cottage any longer. We drove away with our belongings. We left behind the estate on Old Trace Road, with its tall oak trees and rows of eucalyptus that dropped silver leaves and brown seed pods everywhere, the quaint rose garden surrounded by a picket fence and crisscrossed with brick paths, the secretarial duties in the big house where Mrs. Fowle conducted phone conversations on her red phone. Peculiarly enough, our new Los Altos home on Parma Way, about two miles from the cottage, had been owned by the daughter of Reed Smoot, the senator from Utah who’d been the subject of a bitter four-year battle in the U.S. Senate. The Smoot hearings, begun in 1904, centered on whether or not he was eligible to be seated in Congress. He’d been called to be a Mormon apostle, and, the outraged said, Mormons were all polygamists . Even though the lds church had discontinued the practice of plural marriage in 1890, after Utah was threatened with refusal of statehood if it didn’t, congressmen still suspected that Smoot, never a polygamist, was nonetheless involved. If Smoot wasn’t personally involved, they insisted, he was still an integral player in the hierarchy of the ldschurch, some of whom were rumored to be keeping their plural wives hidden from public view. Complicity. No doubt. Some even claimed that temple-attending members had taken an “oath of vengeance” against America for past griev- :: Homeward to Zion :: Homeward to Zion : : 71 ances. Eventually, Smoot was given his seat in Congress and remained in the Senate until 1933. David and I were both descended from this polygamous bucket of worms. It was part of our heritage, even a notion skirting the edges of our modern-day sensibility. We’d heard the stories of great-greatgrandfathers —our own and others—with three or more wives. We were acquainted with the vast scope of Joseph Smith’s efforts to restore the pure religion, and, like it or not, Abraham and other Old Testament notables had more than one wife. If asked what I thought, I would have said that polygamy had some strong attributes as well as problems: women had more time to pursue their professions, their independence, and self-reliance; child care was shared; single women and widows could be included in a family where they might not be otherwise; and ideally, everyone could work together to build the Kingdom of God here on earth. When I thought about it in any depth, the concept seemed at least more responsible than serial monogamy , affairs, mistresses, or a ménage à trois (though the literal meaning of that phrase is “a household for three”). Not a simple matter of lusting after young women in their first bloom, as many of its current-day critics were insisting it had to be, polygamy, in its early incarnation among the Mormons, was supposed to be a matter of everyone involved wearing bigger shoes and filling them well. Yet living idyllic lives of loveliness without envy or jealousy proved to be a next-toimpossible challenge. The tendency to compare who received more or less attention was too insidious. When practiced in pioneer days, polygamy, for the most part, worked better in theory. Even though undertaken with eternal significance in mind, it had been a less-than-desirable situation for many of the wives: the first wife having to share what she thought was her given right, the second or third (or more) wives only allowed into the family with the first wife’s permission. This led to a complicated pecking order. And, when a woman’s salvation depended on marriage to a righteous husband , as Church leaders preached at the time, there weren’t many available : “Many are called but few are chosen”—the scriptures echoed the sentiment. If a man was considered righteous, did this mean he knew how [44.197.113.64] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:34 GMT) 72 : : r a w e d g e s to treat his wives equally as the ideal suggested? Because of these complex factors, divorce in Utah in the late 1800s was easy to come by and the numbers were astonishingly high. When we still attended the Stanford Ward, while we were students and I’d helped my Relief Society sisters sew items for the Christmas Bazaar, we’d discussed what it would be...