Abstract
T IS IRONIC that Mormonism, so native to United States that Tolstoi called it the religion, 1 once seemed notoriously unAmerican. To Christian Convention gathered in Salt Lake City in 1888 to review the situation in it seemed, in fact, anti-American. Reverend A. S. Bailey, addressing all denominational workers in Territory, believed that traveler visiting Utah would find not simply more that is European than American, but a spirit foreign to spirit of Americans, . . . system indigenous indeed, but hostile to ideas. 2 His charges were familiar: Mormonism restrained trade in forbidding Saints to do business with Gentiles; it controlled People's Party, invoking religious test for political office; it levied taxes on property in form of tithing; it indoctrinated schools; it mocked home with its oriental abomination, polygamy; it was Kingdom bent on overthrowing Government. With missionaries in every State in Union, with strong lobby at national capital, and with recruits being brought in by hundreds from Old World, this plague cannot be easily quarantined. 3 To Christian patriots determined to make an end of polygamy and theocratic rule in Utah, flow of proselytes from abroad was particular vexation. It was all too true that Mormonism, as British reviewer observed, owed its survival and continuing growth to persecution, martyrdom, and immigration. 4 Immigration fed all other iniquities: it replenished polygamy, it strengthened hand of priesthood, it supplied subservient colonizers to extend American Turkey and docile voters to spread its subversive influence. Reverend J. M. Coyner imagined annual trainloads of foreign converts scattered over great mountain regions of West and shuddered to think Mormonism might eventually
Published Version
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