32 Post-Manifesto Polygamy

can all take a long breath again. Oh, what an immense amount of trouble would have been avoided if he had remained in Japan a couple of months longer.

The second problem rose out of Idaho’s rabid anti-Mormon Fred T. Dubois’s desire to travel to Salt Lake City on a fact-finding mission regarding his suspicions that post-Manifesto polygamy was on the rise. 

While official church statements denied the charge of increasing post-Manifesto plural marriages, a study of Helen and Owen’s close circle of friends and relatives clearly supports its occurrence. Again, Quinn suggests that the church hierarchy was divided and ambiguous about the post-Manifesto polygamy issue and argues that while President Lorenzo Snow mildly opposed it, instructing the full Quorum of the Twelve to stop performing plural marriages, he probably gave individual approval for some of the apostles, including Owen, to marry plural wives. He also argues that Joseph F. Smith, as counselor and then as president, privately promoted post-Manifesto polygamy.  Helen’s sister, Susan, for example, became Heber Bennion’s wife in a monogamous marriage in 1885. She had given birth to ten children by 1900 and, shortly thereafter, about the time of Owen’s polygamous marriage to Avery, her husband married two additional wives, Mary Bringhurst in 1902 and Emma Jane Webster in 1900. In addition, Edwin “Teddy” Bennion, Heber’s brother, married Mary Clark, Avery’s sister, in a polygamous relationship in April 1904. Interestingly, Avery’s father, Hyrum D. Clark, also became a polygamist on December 3, 1903, marrying Mary Alice Robinson. Heber J. Grant also recorded that President Snow told him in 1901 to “take the action needed to increase my family.” The timing of these post-Manifesto marriages within the same circle of family and friends implies an attempted renewal of plural marriage as advocated by apostles Cowley and Taylor.

Post-Manifesto polygamy carried the same significance as earlier polygamy: compliance would qualify one for eternal salvation. As Carrie A. Miles argues in “Polygamy and the Economics of Salvation,” “Many questions that polygamy raises for us today were simply not a problem in early Mormonism, since the basis of plural marriage was salvation, not love, sex or material production.”  This basic belief, however, became more emotionally difficult to practice at the turn of the century because companionate marriage — the union of two approximate equals, based on mutual respect, affection, and the close companionship of husband and wife — was becoming the American social norm. Thus, according to Miles, the substance of comments like the following from Brigham Young in 1856 made less sense to the husbands and wives of 1900: