--- title: Improvement Era description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930. authors: - Frankau, Gilbert collections: - periodicals tags: - magazine - improvement-era periodical: Improvement Era volume: 30 number: 1 published: 1926-11 publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations publisher_place: Salt Lake City language: en type: magazine reference: "Frankau, Gilbert, “Among the Mormons,” *Improvement Era* 30, no. 1 (November 1926): 36–39." source: url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera3001unse transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers. identifier: improvementera3001unse start_page: 36 end_page: 39 rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1926-11) source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera3001unse publication_year: 1926 note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1926, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright. --- # Among the Mormons AMONG THE "MORMONS" By Captain Gilbert Frankau [Captain Gilbert Frankau, as will be remembered, spoke in the Salt Lake Tabernacle on May 23, 1926. His short address contained very favorable utterances respecting the Latter-day Saints. It is not unusual to have people from all parts of the world speak in the Tabernacle before the "Mormons," and there give fair and often flattering statements concerning this people. Many, however, on reaching other places, under other cir- cumstances, are not so outspoken in their favor. Captain Gilbert Frankau is a noted exception. In his own country he did not change his opinion expressed in Salt Lake City concerning the "Mormons." This is made plain from a writing reproduced, by permission, in the Millennial Star of August 26, 1926, from the Sunday Pictorial, London, of July 4. As stated by the English press, he was commissioned to clear up for Britain the entire "Mormon" situation. The Pictorial article was accompanied by an editorial introduction, reading: "In continuation of his tour through America, Mr. Frankau has visited the city of rumors, Salt Lake City, and found that it is the finest and best administered of all he has visited. The graphic .'tory of the original pilgrimage of the first 'Mormons' to their Zion is recounted, and Mr. Frankau disposes once and for all of the story that polygamy is still secretly practiced there." An editorial in the Millennial Star further states that it is recorded that Captain Gilbert Frankau himself stated: "The time has come for the misconceptions in Britain regarding 'Mormons' to be wiped out. That feel- ing is a menace to the coordination of thought and action of the two great Anglo-Saxon peoples." The Era takes great pleasure in reproducing Captain Frankau's article, and in adding thanks to him for his fairly spoken sentiments about this Church and people. — Editors.] "This is the Place — Brigham Young." Look down, as I looked down yesterday, from the Wasatch foothills, from the plain granite pillar which bears this simple inscription; and you will admit that Brigham Young, maker of the State of Utah — though he did have nineteen wives and fifty-six children by them — was more of a leader than any, barring Mussolini, whom this planet breeds today. From the place of the pillar — and not eighty years have gone by since he first came to it — you can see much of this dead leader's handiwork. Snow-capped mountains circle his chosen valley. Beyond, at the foot of the Oquirrh range, Salt Lake shimmers silver to the sunshine of the West. And this side the lake spreads Salt Lake City, the hub of "Mormonism," and of all those exaggerated rumors which have been such a gold mine to the story-tellers of the past. For most of the things you have heard about "Mormons" are rumors. There are no walled harems in this modern Zion, and hardly a "plural wife," and few even of those "wild parties" whereby present-day young America seeks to prove that humanity can never be made moral by an un- natural law. AMONG THE "MORMONS" 3 7 Zion, today, is a city of much peace, of law and order, of religious tolerance, of granite buildings, and of wide streets, tree-lined, where monogamous young lovers walk o.' nights. Listen, for a moment, to the romance of this city's founding. Th:y came here — Brigham Young, one hundred and forty-three men, three women and two children were with him — driven by murder and political persecution from that other city, Nauvoo, which they had founded in Illinois. They came in ox-carts and on horseback, across thirteen hundred miles of barren flats, and steep canyons, and aching deserts, whereon the bleached buffalo skulls winked like yellow lanterns in the driven dust. They wrote messages on the buffalo skulls, "Passed this way. All well. June 20": because, behind them were to come many thousands, trusting in their guidance to the Promised Land. And they did come after, those many thousands, some of them so poor that they could afford neither oxen nor horses, but only handcarts for their humble gear. And how many died on their way to the Promised Land only the prairie coyotes knew. But long before those handcart parties staggered wearily through Emigration Canyon, the first seeds of the pioneers were sprouting, and the first potatoes gathered, and town planning — as the rest of America does not understand town planning — had begun. That was in 1847; and for many years thereafter, right up to the early eighties, Brigham Young's great work went on. Out of sage brush desert he made a civilization. All across the State, which is as large as Great Britain, he built his cities, drove his ploughshares, sent his horsemen, planted his fruit trees, sunk his mines. Material prosperity grew, and the prestige of the "Mormon" Church with it, until, just about the time of our Queen Victoria's first jubilee, the great outcry against polygamy began. But since the system existed, had existed for two generations — though only about four per cent of the male "Mormons" were practicing it at the time — it happened, as always happens with the stubborn Anglo-Saxon, that the great outcry pro- voked a great fight. Polygamy, remember, was part, though by no means the essential part, of the "Mormon" religion. And accordingly, when the United States Government passed a law abolishing it and providing that only the "first wife" of a "Mormon" should be recognized by law, the "Mormons" challenged that law in the Supreme Court, and, having lost their case, went to prison rather than renounce their "celestial sisters" or make illegitimate those children who, according to their Church, were as legitimate as yours or mine. Until, in the end, after six years of struggle, during which the "Mormon" Church was actually deprived of its lands and properties, Anglo-Saxondom reached its usual compromise. The plural wives and children of the past were declared legitimate, provided that polygamy for the future should be barred. , ' That compromise was reached in the early nineties. Today 38 IMPROVEMENT ERA (believe one who has journeyed far for this investigation.) "Mormon- ism's" bar against polygamy is of the stoutest steel. The Church of Latter-day Saints (to give it its correct title) has kept its bargain with the United States Government. Nowadays polygamy, if detected, means excommunication; and because, both in its faith and its actions, this particular Church is far more rigid than the most' rigid Roman Catholicism, that penalty of excommunication is enough. I stake my good name as a realist that here, in Salt Lake City, the most active searcher will fail to discover any trace of recent polygamy. The few plural wives who still live — I have met some of them — are mere curiosities, mere relics of the pioneering past. To me as a novelist their tales are interesting; but nowadays such tales are stuff for fiction and not for fact. Yet, it is a fact that "Mormonism," as a religion, still flourishes; still holds its believers; still makes many converts — and still suffers, not always in silence, from the legends of its past. Let me give you an instance of this. Today, Sunday (the "Mormon" Church allows "Gentiles" to preach at its services). After I had spoken in the vast, steel-roofed Tabernacle, which seats its ten thousand and possesses one of the finest organs in the world, there came to me, along with an ex-officer of the Norfolk Regiment and his sister, another Englishwoman, newly converted, young and hand- some, with something of laughter and something of anger in her bright, blue eyes. She told me her name, which — though she did not ask mc to do so — I will keep confidential. "You may have heard of me," she went on. "The newspapers at home made an awful fuss about my conversion. They said I had been kidnaped and that mother had rushed over here to see if there was any way by which I could be saved. Mother's of the Church, too. She only came out on a visit. We've had many a laugh over the things that were written about us. It is funny, isn't it? Still, we do wish the newspapers wouldn't print such rot." The truth about "Mormonism" is simple. Religiously, it is merely a creed like so many others. And though I personally cannot bring myself to believe in its main tenet, that God the Father and God the Son appeared in person to a ca-llow boy, named Joseph Smith, in New England a few years after the Battle of Waterloo — any more than I can believe that some of the very pleasant people at whose houses I have foregathered, are "priests forever after the order of Melchizedek" ■ — these "Mormons," judged by their works, seem to me justified before the world. As I have said, the State of Utah owes its founding to their energy. They have made it, and are continuing to develop it. Their habits are ascetic; their energies immense. Their "Book of Wisdom" forbids them to smoke, drink, lie, swear or gamble. But they are intensely tolerant of other people's habits and of other people's religions. Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Jews, Methodists, Chris- tian Scientists, Episcopalians, are all enjoying here their full religious freedom. AMONG THE "MORMONS" ?9 Brigham Young himself, indeed, gave the Utah Roman Catholics their first piece of land and their first hundred pound subscription, while the present Governor of the State, elected just as we elect a Member of Parliam:nt. is of that same Roman Catholic faith, though 66 per cent of the electorate are "Mormons." "Mormons," moreover, pay the full, old-time 10 per cent of their income for Church upkeep and charity; take care of all deserving poor in their parishes; set their faces against Socialism, Bolshevism, and Communism as rigidly as they set their faces against murder or arson. Their missionaries come to us in England at their own expense. They even pay the Church for the "literature" which they distribute. So, however much we disagree with these people, at least let us leave off libelling them. Earnest they certainly are. Too earnest, perhaps. But they are earnest only in their religious doctrine, in their belief that the "Mormon" Church has received a new revelation. Ulterior motives they have none. And if anybody after reading this article still imagines that "Mormon" missionaries come to Great Britain for the purpose of decoy- ing British spinsters of certain or uncertain ages into secret harems — I C2n only advise him to take a little walk down State Street or South Temple avenue, Salt Lake City, when the high moon is riding molten above the elms and the poplars which Brigham Young planted, and observe the many Utah maidens, whose bright eyes regard the stranger sideways from under silken lashes as he passes by. For they are very, very alluring, these Utah maidens — so alluring, indeed, that "Mormon" polygamy, if ever it comes to be re-started, will most certainly begin, like "Mormon" charity, at home . His Presence Seems Everywhere Somehow when away from the city, Away from the marts of men, There's a feeling of worship far more sublime On the mountain top, in the lonely glen. There's a sense of awe, as one hears the sigh Of the stately pine trees there, For they seem to whisper the Master's love, As their music fills the air. There is perfect peace and contentment there. And one's heart is filled with love. As they list to the happy song of the bird. As they praise their Maker above. It takes from one's soul the slightest doubt. For an unseen power is there; And you breathe a prayer to the Giver of all, For his presence seems everywhere. Mesa, Arizona. IDA R. ALLDREDGE.