Religion of a Different Color by Reeve W. Paul

Author:Reeve, W. Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-01-29T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.2 “A Mormon Family Out for a Walk.” Reprinted from John D. Sherwood, The Comic History of the United States, from a Period Prior to the Discovery of America to Times long Subsequent to the Present (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870), 451. Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

The description of Mormonism in Sherwood’s Comic History also plays off then-current ideas about race and “species” to call Mormonism “a new shrub” in America’s “flowering ecclesiastial [sic] garden.” It was a plant that “bore the female variety in alarming disproportion” and was identified as the genus polygamous. In Sherwood’s words, it was “a very rank weed, smelling earthily to heaven,” and its “numerous Young off-shoots,” he suggested, “require severe cutting, if not distinct sub-soil treatment.” In short, Mormonism was a weed of its own genetic classification, the offspring of which deserved to be eradicated.15

In 1881 Chic magazine also racialized the Mormon family (see figure 6.3). It ran a two-page pictorial entitled “The Elders’ Happy Home,” designed to poke fun at the imagined difficulty of polygamist wives getting along as bed partners. The cartoon depicted at least ten women fighting with each other in and around an oversized bed. The husband, meanwhile, detaches himself from the chaos; he is depicted as a helpless witness atop the boudoir and clearly not in charge of his wives (let alone his marital bed). In the foreground nine infants cry or lie otherwise neglected in an elongated crib. At first glance it is yet another jab at polygamy’s perversion of gender and family, this time with strong and combative women dominating the home while a timid husband is relegated to the margins. Yet there is also an overt interracial statement embedded in the scene as well. The second baby from the left is the lone black person in the “happy home,” a powerful marker of interracial ruin. The fact that there are no black women among the fighting wives suggests that either a black wife is absent from the room or that the tainted nature of polygamous relationships produced cursed offspring independent of any black parentage. In either case, the wailing black baby offers clear evidence of racial deterioration inherent in Mormon polygamy.16

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