Mormon Pageants as American Historical Performance Martha S. LoMonaco Mormon pageants are dramatizations of important episodes of American history that have been largely ignored by people outside of the Mormon faith. These pageants, outdoor historical dramas, are produced every summer as an evangelical, informational, and celebratory mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). There are seven pageants sanctioned by the Church, and all but one, an Easter pageant based on biblical text, dramatize personalities and events in Mormon history as they relate to the larger history of the United States. The productions are free of charge, are held in enormous outdoor amphitheatres that can accommodate thousands of spectators, and are performed from ten days to one month between June and August. All can be described as “symphonic dramas of American history,” which is the phrase Paul Green used to describe The Lost Colony and subsequent outdoor historical dramas that meld historic personages and events with dramatic storytelling filled with music, movement, and pageantry.1 They also dramatize the historical events on or near the sites where the events actually occurred so that audiences can “walk on hallowed ground” and have history “made real and alive to them,” which the Institute of Outdoor Drama (IOD) considers a principal ingredient in the success of the genre.2 The pageants provide an alternative view of nineteenth-century U.S. history that challenges traditional narratives. Mormons were commonly depicted, along with Native and African Americans, as the feared “other” who, through their unusual lifestyle and religious practices, were perceived as threats to the morality and stability of the emerging nation. They aroused hostility and suffered persecution from their inception as 70 M A R T H A S . L O M O N A C O a new religious community in the late 1820s, but anti-Mormon prejudice was not solely based on religion. As historians Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton point out, for Mormons “‘religion’ encompassed much more than it did for their contemporaries. . . . Religion included not only theology and a standard of morality but also an eschatology, an economic philosophy, and a goal of community-building that inevitably meant political and economic tension with their neighbors.”3 E. E. Ericksen attributes “Mormon group consciousness and group morality” to their reluctance to assimilate into the larger community, while nonbelievers feared the economic competition and political domination that these sizable groups of Mormons, who “voted as a bloc,” wielded particularly in rural areas.4 There also was a shared revulsion for a religion that challenged the widely accepted values held by more traditional Christians, who believed that “civilization was founded on a basic commitment to Christianity.”5 This fear and loathing caused LDS adherents to be characterized by polemicists as a “mass of human corruption,” “deluded fanatics,” and “the dregs of society,” among other slurs, and their beliefs to be “superstitious, disgusting, and repellent,” as well as “a monstrous evil.” Verbal denigration was often accompanied by physical abuse, which ranged from “threatening to shoot cattle, whip Mormons who resisted, demolish houses, or kill Mormons who sought redress; stealing or destroying property; burning, razing, or otherwise destroying houses and mills; whipping and beating or tarring and feathering men; turning people out of their homes; and ‘driving’ groups of Mormons to new locations.”6 After the LDS published its official sanction of polygamy in 1852, local and regional persecutions expanded to a national scale that involved the federal government and the military. The new Republican Party adopted a “radical, reformist platform” at its 1856 convention that included “an explicit connection between polygamy and slavery” that it termed “the twin relics of barbarism” in the U.S. territories. The party’s call to abolish these “relics,” which it also dubbed the “nation’s two peculiar domestic institutions,” quickly escalated to a national cause célèbre that resulted , at various times, in open warfare, congressional legislation, and a continuing struggle over governance of the Utah territory.7 The Mormon leadership formally and publicly proclaimed the cessation of polygamous practice in 1890, and after prolonged efforts to attain statehood, Utah finally became a state in 1896. Yet renegade bands of fundamentalists who...