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First, it's clouds of dust thin far away. Then on the horizon a line takes shape, wagons,
uniforms, cavalry, and army with a mission. The United States is coming. In Salt Lake City, Brigham Young gives the order. No pitched battles, no glorious stand, scorched the grass, empty the outposts, scattered the herds. This army must march into a void. Better to destroy Zion than to surrender it. This is no rebellion of the standard variety.
“More like a nuisance tightening on these troops, begging the question "Who's land is this?”
Those who came to build a kingdom? Or the nation they left behind? Now marching to claim it as
theirs?" The Mormon rebellion is about to begin.
To help tell us more about this important event, we welcome Professor Peter Covello of the University of Illinois. His book "Make Yourselves God's Mormon's and the unfinished business of American secularism was a finalist for the John Whitmer Historical Association Award for Best History Book." I'm Don Wildman, and this is American History Head. Peter, welcome back. Nice to see you again.
Don, it's a pleasure to see you. Thank you for having me. You were last with us in 2023, another world
ago. 300 episodes ago. Check the archives for episode 86 Mormons and the founding of Salt Lake
City, in which we discussed Peter and I, the origins and western migrations of those people called Mormons, through the 1830s and 40s, today we dive more into the 1850s. After the establishment of Utah as a territory of the United States, all the consequence of the victorious Mexican-American
“War. At here, into this highly controversial religion, have now set up shop in Utah. That's what”
we're going to be talking about today. Three years as a long time ago, Peter, I'm a bit rusty. Let's briefly review those origins, shall we? Well, no one's more rusty than I. But we'll try. Yeah, that's it. Okay, we'll be quick about this. 1830, Mormonism is founded by Joseph Smith, when he happens upon the golden plates in western New York State, undergoes a spiritual transformation, these plates contain a religious history of this ancient American religion. Take us through that
and the bullet points of this subject. Very, very, very quickly, he writes the book of Mormon, in upstate New York, and gathers around him a bunch of tractors, but also a lot of followers, over the course of the decade, Mormons migrate west. Joseph Smith is intensely charismatic, and also intensely theologically imaginative. So he writes the book of Mormon, but he keeps writing it. He keeps thinking and he keeps pressurizing. And as he does so, the faith gathers to itself more adherence
and a more vehement kind of detractor. It's really the ultimate Protestant religion in that it's correcting what's wrong with Protestantism, isn't it? He's, well, I mean, it depends on who you ask, right? They understand themselves as a vigorously counter Protestantism. That is to say like, the whole point of Mormonism, or not the whole point. But a big point of Mormonism is millennia of religion has conspired to get you to believe that God is different from you, that the world is
fallen. In fact, this is incorrect. Christianity itself is an apostasy why, because God is a brethren human, and you yourself in the mortal world are living in an unfalling body, and you yourself are speeding toward divinization, because God wants everything that's best about human life, body, and joy, friendship, love, to be eternal. Well, to be yours eternity. So yeah, that's the
You've already left behind.
God, could become divine themselves, one with him of God. Exactly. That's where the title of
“your book comes from, right? Yes. Make yourselves God to make yourselves God to He. I mean,”
you can see the gorgeousness of the vision. He is willing to imagine a far more expansively loving kind of God, certainly than any Calvinist. God, God is not only this, not this like radically other occasionally malevolent figure. God is rather a sibling human, a person that that that you are the God and persons are different in degree, but not in kind. Oh, no wonder it's kind of diversity. This would really, really rough all the feathers of a lot of Puritans. This is why the Mormons
have to increasingly migrate west as we covered on our previous episode. They are being persecuted.
They're being pushed away from communities. They are in terrible things happen to them.
The growth of Mormonism led to earlier believers facing this persecution by moving onward. From 1833, the Mormons were repeatedly forced out of towns. They moved into Illinois where you are. By 1838, things have become so tense that Governor Lillburn bogs in that state said Mormons must now be treated as enemies. They must be exterminated or driven from the state. Boy, it gets intense. And by 1839 they were made in order. Yeah, they have created something called
Nalvoo. Nalvoo is on the edge of Illinois. Yeah, it's a river town on the edge of Illinois, which is their sort of own town. And that's where like the grandest theological speculation that Smith will produce really happens. It's a scene of like super intense theological
“foment. It's where Smith comes to the revelation that one of the key components of exaltation”
of the idea that humans can exalt themselves into gods is polygamy, is below patriarchal marriage. And there's a lot, a lot, a lot of different ways of reading that. Is it a restoration of Old Testament? Beliefs is it a hyper patriarchalization of a world that's becoming more industrial and more gender equitable in the 19th century? You can make those things stick for me
in my reading of Mormonism. It's really just an essential part of what Smith understands as the
theology of Mormonism that is to say the world is unfalling. We live in these in unfalling bodies. And it's incredibly hard to believe that. You need a discipline of practice that for him as plural marriage. Anyway, he has that revelation. They don't publicize it for a while, not surprisingly, because it makes people furious. But of course, already scandal surrounds them, they're accused of many things, but in particularly, including being accused of like being
perverts, you know, who's pretend devotions have led them into perversity. And that accusation of course allows people like Lilburn Boggs to say what we should probably do is extreme. I mean, it's really deep. What is the latter day, Saint, referred to? What is that? The name of the movement? Uh, so it's the world is like, we are in a state of revelation in the present tense. Okay. That revelation didn't end in the days of the Bible. It exists now. I see. Present tense. God speaks as much
in the present tense. Now, of course, like that particular version of counter Protestant devotion has other analogs. Like the Mormons don't have to look around them very far to see what it looks like to be a kind of belief practice, a scant's that of normative American
“Protestants. That's how native peoples were persecuted explicitly as either as people who's”
backwards counter-prouts and beliefs made them, again, fit for extermination. So the Mormons feel this like very complex identification with native peoples who appear in the book of Mormon as laymenites and stuff like that. So it's a super fraught identification because they also want to identify as, you know, white people with all the powers of Empire belonging to them as well. So they take all that with them into the West. The whole thing that we're not going to get into, but it's
really about returning to the homeland for this movement because in their minds there have been previous tribes of, I guess, white Europeans, essentially have been here before they weren't Europeans, but this is like a very interesting, cyclical story that's returning them essentially to a garden of Eden. And so this makes North America and America that much more special when they consider this. And this was all what was written down on the plates that Joseph Smith creates, the book of Mormon
out of. Navu was a very significant settlement. One of the largest cities in Illinois at the time. Had a militia, the Navu, Navu, uh, Legion for shadowing what's to come at temple, which has
Had been rebuilt even today, a charter to the government.
Joseph Smith is killed in 1984 in a mob from. Yes, he's assassinated in prison. You can still go
“Carthage, Illinois. And the Mormons are not wrong. This is anticipating where we're going in the”
1850s. The Mormons surely cannot be blamed for thinking of themselves as persecuted. Yeah. And as persons that the state and elements of the state are breached a murder. They had executed Joseph Smith. There'd been a massacre at Juan's mail. Been the extermination order. So some historians will refer to the Mormons' persecution complex. I understand where that comes from. But they have some real data to go on in the 19th century. You know, the state itself had expressed a great willingness
to massacre the Mormons. Right. To the degree that they're even remotely identified with native
peoples as fellow exiles from an imperial America, they also understand what extermination looks like. They also can see their own faiths written out in the fate of native peoples. So obviously,
“there's talk among them of a homeland. And this would be where we're heading when we come back”
after a break. But before we get there, I just want to underscore the fact that it's polygamy really is a major issue for Americans at that time. And people still talk about it. You know, it still gives everybody the hebys. But back then, we're talking about a time of greater religion and, you know, established religions that really mix up with the politics just as they do today. Of course, but back then, it was a big deal. When the wider US found out of a polygamy in
the 1850s, they were horrified. Mormons became a huge debating point in the 1956 presidential election of James Buchanan, major major point. So after the break, we'll come back and talk about how those tensions reach their peak in Utah. Welcome back. We're discussing the Mormon religion with Professor Peter Koviello. So we've established Peter some of the Mormon beliefs and why tensions began growing between them
and eventually the federal government, first the state government of Illinois, of course,
was really on them. Events to keep in mind as we get further into Utah, 1847, Brigham Young, who is a lieutenant of Joseph Smith, takes over after Joseph Smith's assassination. And they had West. They go by way of Missouri, of course, like everybody does. Important to keep in mind at this point, 1847, where they will end up Utah is still part of Mexican territory. The Mexican American war hasn't been fought yet. That's an 1848-49 kind of time. The land becomes US territory
after we win that war. And the Treaty of Hirntago gives us that massive amount of land in the West. Congress creates the Utah territory as part of the compromise of 1850. All right. So that sets the stage for all of what we're about to talk about. Yes, the fraught 1850s. Yeah. By this time, as you have completely explained to us, there is good reason why these Mormons should be circling their wagons. And they are very worried about what's coming next. Was Utah in
“their crosshairs or that area in the crosshairs that far west as they made their migration?”
Not necessarily. You know, this is the place. They found a place that looked habitable and looked like it could hold the saints, the population of Mormons. But it was also at what for Brigham Young, particularly, was at like a saving distance from the Eastern United States. And it's increasingly apocalyptic tensions, of course, were in the run-up to slavery. Yeah. And it also helped to foment the dream of a nation apart from the United States. The fallen and doomed United States,
which is again, you can, is very easy to read the Book of Mormon as prophesying the fall of the Americans whom the Mormons will call the Gentiles. And it's very easy to think that the native people will have a role in that destruction too. Wouldn't it be cool to do a PhD thesis on apocalyptic thinking historically throughout all of American history? Because boy, that's a big part of the mid-19th century. I mean, you've got the Mormons, you've got the whole south is thinking
about themselves as a part from this, and that's a very religious world down there. It's just got
To be boiled into the, into the, the fat of America, isn't it?
tempting option at all at all points. Don, I also appreciate that we're having this conversation
on whatever day today is April 7th under the tweeted threat of the annihilation of an entire civilization. Right. Like eschatologies don't really go away. And eschatology is a real real part of the book of Mormon. The book of Mormon is like strangely the account of a, of a righteous people of the Nephites who are annihilated. It's the like remaining account of of a people who backslide and are followed in so God sees fit to them being annihilated. The Mormons are read out into that,
“a fate of backsliding America. How do they know they're backsliding because they've so persecuted us?”
Because they have so cast out. They're most righteous people, the Mormons, the saints. We've been cast out into the West that for us prophesied and this, now I just sound like Brigham Young and the 1850s, this prophesied the doom of the nation. I would say that repeatedly. It was named the state of desert. Am I getting that pronunciation correct? I believe you are correct. Okay. And desert translates, I guess, probably loosely into, by honeybee. Like those brought
by the original Jarrodites from Jerusalem. I mentioned before that we've been here before according to the Mormons. And that was an early tribe then. Yeah, the book of Mormon says these guys, the Jarrodites quite literally, after a guy named Jarrod, were here before and they had brought with them honeybees, which I guess propagated and become spread around the North America and a symbol of industriousness. Yes, exactly. Good for that. And indomitability. Right. And little
tiny cubicles. Very comfortable, I guess. But a year later, Utah becomes a U.S. territory in 1850. As I mentioned, because of the Mexican-American War victory. At that point, federal oversight in the area begins. That's got to be a ominous note for the, for the Mormons. Very fraught. Very fraught. Trouble is Brigham. The Mormon rebellion that we're really talking about in this
“is not a war in a traditional sense. It's more of an ongoing standoff over sovereignty, right?”
That's done. That's perfectly said. That's exactly right. Who and, of course, what the Mormons want is the, what they will eventually get once they were not's polygamy at the end of the century, which is the protected if limited sovereignty of statehood. Because, of course, statehood grants you all kinds of sovereign powers. As we know, and the civil war had litigated in blood, what exactly the extent of those sovereign powers were. They don't have that. What they have
is territory, which is much, much more disputed. Though, of course, what the Mormons have going for them is there are many thousands of miles away, used to coast in the outposts of the federal government. And so that allows Brigham to maneuver rather more widely than he would have if he was in, say, Pennsylvania or Ohio. And the detractors of the Mormons call what's being created there a theocratic state or a theo democracy. The Mormons think that they are practicing what
on the east coast they like to call religious freedom. Of course, there's a lot of contestation over what gets to count as religion. Right. Now, and the Mormons on polygamy and on the way that polygamy made them, like, they were called all sorts of things in the 1930s. Hommadans
was a very favorite one. They were always being accused of being secretly India,
fomenting rebellions with the Indians, right? So they, they, they, they understand themselves to be in possession of religious freedom, right? And then I understand polygamy to be a part of that religious freedom, the federal government does not understand it that way. These are some of the interior tensions that are really rolling across the 1850s, which is, as you say, already a semi-apocalyptic time because of the fight about slavery that is brewing and becoming
more and more apocalyptic. US president, James E. Cannon, sends federal troops over to you talk to install a new gun. He sends almost one third. Yeah, of the entire army is sent out there.
“This is a very important impression. Which is an amazing, like, that that very, I remember when I was”
reading that, I was like, I knew Leo, he sends, like, I don't know, 2500, 3000 troops or something
like that, but like that, it's like a third of the standing army, right? It goes to Utah. And what you
cannon will say in Washington, you see, is that Brigham Young is an open rebellion against the United States of America. And Brigham Young will say, you cannon is fighting a war of extermination. Yeah, and lots of war of extermination. And in the survey, both of them are correct. They're, they're both of them pretty near on to right. So it looks very much like that's going to happen.
The mountain meadows massacre happens, which inflames things gravely.
arrival, the Mormons prepare for defense. They're evacuation of Mormon settlements. They kind of
practice a scorched earth policy of burning out grassy areas. So there's nowhere for these horses to graze. They will target U.S. supply lines. And as mentioned before, there's no major pitch battles here. It's just kind of an ongoing practice of, let's starve these guys out. So they'll turn around and go home. There is heavy duty bloodshed in one event. It's called the mountain meadows massacre 1857. Members of a Mormon militia known as the Navu Legion and local participants,
“kill dozens of immigrants passing through Utah. This is a really hairy thing, isn't it?”
Premendously so. Premendously so. And there's much contestation in the historiography, did young, uh, say he certainly, the rhetoric and discourse around the area was definitely coming from young and it was definitely bloody and intent. Whether or not he authorized the actual attack on all of the, uh, immigrants is a different question. He will not be tried, but a different moment. Will be they are in league with some pilots in the area. They clumsily attempt to blame it on the
pilots. Oh, we didn't kill these immigrants. It was an Indian massacre. That's exposed in the next year. So of course, the Mormons think of immigrants as passageways for the state to get at them. So they mistrust them violently. And when they murder these people, the state is like, okay, these are now. This is a part of people in bloody rebellion. Yeah. There was a great series on this
“of sort of many series last year on, I think it was Netflix, where they, it's called American”
Prime Evil. I mean, they at least cast this in an insanely violent tone. It was really heavy duty. And that's, I mean, again, you, you, you say just right, there's an eschatological edge to the period and Brigham is not shy about saying the federal agents who've come here and maligned our civilization should have been hung in the streets. He just says things like that. I mean, right. And so if you
cared and it's not exactly wrong, on the other hand, he did send a third of the federal army out
presumably to destroy a religious sect in the West, right, for orotic practices that they didn't really believe in in back east. Yeah. At least 120 people are killed in the situation. A cover-up is attempted trying to shift the blame to Native Americans nearby. It has the effect of damaging the Mormon moral standing even further, right? This does no good for their reputation in America.
“Kind of, though, I, I think that's right, though, it is also the case that”
polygamy was something of violation. Yeah. Yeah. And polygamy was such a ready-to-hand way to dismiss any Mormon claim to dig the sovereignty piece. Anything you wanted and to do it as what happened in the 19th century, frantically, in, like, frantically racializing terms. Yeah, hominin. They're Indian, like the followers are slave, like in their sick of fancy, ecclesiastical leaders. So the
Mormons are always being produced as dubiously white people. Yeah. Like, there's a great line
in a Jack London story where the, you know, somebody says it's so that, well, can't get those or white, oh, they ain't white, they're Mormons. And that's a real, that's, of course, in the 19th century, the Mormons are, again, not wrong. You're in that. Yeah. The possibility of having become expendable life. They are not ignorant of what the federal government does to racialized life. Black populations. Native populations. So they're not really wrong.
Yeah. This kind of wraps up in mid-1858, the US Army ends up marching unopposed through to Salt Lake City and into it. It ends relatively quickly with a, with a negotiated piece. This was due, of course, because there was a lot going on back east. I mean, you know, there was a lot happening. This is, uh, this is, becomes a minor problem compared to what's boiling up real fast. That's very right. Yeah. But you can't as facing a lot of pressure at home to bring this crisis
to an end. In the end, the whole affair, sending the Army out, the whole blood shed, everything was called Buchanan's blunder in the, in the press. He looks real bad. Buchanan was no, you know, he wasn't doing too well in many regards as a president, but this was certainly staying on his character. I want to circle back because we're about to talk about Brigham Young, you know, officially becoming the governor of Utah at this point. Tell me about this man. Who was Brigham
Young and, and why did he step into the role? Yes. Well, Brigham Young in a certain way that I will
Both say and then invite you to mistrust slightly.
to Joseph Smith, who was theologically minded intensely charismatic or rhetorically gifted
“and a graphomania. He just wrote and wrote and wrote with tremendous down-home eloquence. Like a”
kind of, there's a, there's a, there's a with minion aspect to just, that's not Brigham Young, Brigham Young is an organizer. Right. And he is called by many historians, the great colonizer of the West. He is going to be the great systematizer. So where Joseph Smith has left behind this intense cosmology, that's kind of under codified. He is going to turn it into a structure of leadership in which he sits at the top and he distributes authority carefully. And that makes him very
screwed. It's easy to think of him. I find it my own writing. I have to resist the urge, which I don't
fully resist, to think of him as kind of a villain in as much as the theology of Mormonism is ungovernably multiple before Joseph Smith is murdered. Pligamy is just for men, but is it just for men? Well, the women in the female relief society had some other idea and then Brigham systematize. Systematizes. He, he, he, he, he, he, Patriarchizes and already Patriarchical culture. He bends African American priesthood. He identifies with the racial state, even as he disidentifies
from the United States as such. He just thinks the Mormon is deserve an imperial investor. So he's that sort of complicated figure. He believes that the United States is doomed. He's also incredibly pragmatic. And he wants to protect native peoples that what you mentioned before about the Mormon's fleeing Salt Lake. When people wonder why there are so many Mormon settlements out west, going all the way down to Mexico, all the way up the coast, out the west, it's in part
because he thought the federal government is not going to slaughter all of us if we're scattered, not just in Salt Lake. But in these outposts everywhere. That's a response to this sense of incursion and the sense of vulnerability. That marks the landscape today. Right. You know? Well,
“remember that the the army comes in order to support the idea that they're going to install their”
own governor. The fight is for the Mormons be led by their own. And that is what is negotiated because the Bregrim Young becomes the new governor of Utah. I guess it gets named later on territory. Yeah, the territory of Utah. You can't and pardon the Mormons for their rebellion after they accept this U.S. federal authority. The leader of the novel doesn't sort of the caper on the story as a guy named John Lee in his fate. He's the leader of the novel Legion. John Lee is the
only one charge with murder after that mountain Meto's massacre and was executed years later. Yep. 77. I think many years later, like when Bregrim Young has has given this guy up, the time
has come when they will try John D. Lee and not the Mormon church. And that's what we have always
wanted. So at that point, they have really secured their place in this place. They call desert. But it's going to be renamed Utah. And after this break coming up, we will come back and talk about after the rebellion concludes how Mormonism in Utah eventually settles into American life. Nah, no plans for such a end. Besuch the road kept in a leapness world in Freiburg with a run-mails to the owner, or in the canal from nemen, like all the years. And take
up our interactive exhibition by the elite tour with audio guide and a classic, and the next Parvay Young, the Gansse welcomes the road kept in a leapness world just like a sickling and found. Okay, we're back discussing the Mormons. After the violence of the rebellion ends, we're in still pre civil war, really, aren't we Peter? Which I imagine has really changed the whole calculus of this situation. 1861, when that begins, a lot that had to do with Utah, in effect, it gets
“a clip by what's happening back east. I think that's right, though, what will be a real”
consequence for the Mormons, is you one way, only one way to think about the civil war is as a clarifying contest over the extent and meaning of state sovereignty. And of course, federal sovereignty wins, extremely wins, or with a enormous and un-predicted body count. So, on the one hand, the Mormons survive triumphantly. They survived the federal incursion of 1878, and they returned to Salt Lake with a kind of triumphal look at us.
I mean, other hand, what happens between 1866 and 1888, 1890, a constant, con...
constant, legal undermining of the conditions of existence of the Mormons, which is say a
“series of acts one after another after another, that criminalized polygamy, that make essentially”
make practicing the religion practicing, because he's seditious and make all but impossible the continued existence of the Mormons. Yeah, well, it's inside the federal fold. It's legislated by no less than Congress, several different acts, repeatedly. Yeah, the moral anti-bigamy act passed in 1862 by Congress outlawed plural marriage in U.S. territories, also limited church property ownership. It kind of weekly enforced during the
American Civil War, then comes the Edmunds Act in 1882, that's just 20 years later, which officially disenfranchises polygamous, made unlawful cohabitation a crime, which was easier to prosecute them polygamy. Polygamous had no voting. If you were going to be a polygamous, you'd have no voting, you could not hold office, you could not be on a jury. Sounds pretty good to me.
“Three, Edmunds is the third one, is the Edmunds Tucker Act 18, five years later, 1887,”
dissolves the LDS church as a legal entity imposes federal control over the institutions that had to be the big one, right? Yeah, and that's, so the Mormons are our populist and they have allies back east and they indeed have lobbyists and stuff like that. And there's a great I forgot in the man's name, but there's a there lobbyist in DC says something like, you know,
I've been doing this a long time and I've never seen anything like it back when,
when there were states in the south to determine to hold on to slavery, there were many thousands of people willing to support them. Indeed at the north, there are many thousands of people who support them. You are our body of three or 4,000 people and the 50 millions of the United States have decided, the ligami will be exterminated. And the word he uses is exterminated.
“And what he doesn't have to say is, and if it's not you will be. Wow, of course, incredible”
decimation of native peoples in the west. Once again, I will say the pretext for a lot of that decimation was not land theft. It was religion and a religion that deranged people, sexually the native peoples. They didn't live in coupled households. They didn't have houses. They needed to be disciplined into that. This is how the native ill-fittedness for American life was again and again spoken, which of course had great resonances for the Mormons and the
Mormons. Wow. Interesting. They knew what extermination looked like. Yeah, it was very near them. And so this is the context in which at the end of the century they they end up renouncing polygamy as a condition to gain statehood for Utah. And with it, the protections and sovereignty that come with statehood. Yeah, the screws had been tightened 1886. So much. Yeah, by 1890, the LDS churches president now understand three years later is the Edmunds Tucker Act 1887, which we've
prior to this I'd never heard of. That really does the legal job of of disincorporating this
this church, seasoned church assets, imposing federal control over territorial institutions, including schools and elections. I mean, big time they come down with the hammer. It's in 1890 that the LDS church kind of relents and their president, Wilford Woodruff, issues a manifesto that officially ended plural marriages. So if you ever wondered, well, what happened to that polygamy that was such a big deal in the 1800s for for the Mormons, this is what happened. The federal government
came down hard. The federal government threatened to murder everyone. And now is that that had a pretty normalizing effect. I'll read you a little passage in a letter would refer to it, which is for me incredibly revealing. He writes this letter in 1889, which was a friend of his name, William Eckenley says, we are now politically speaking the dependent or word of the United States, but in a state capacity, we should be freed from such dependency and would possess the powers and
independence of the sovereign state. The dependent or word, what's striking to me about that is that is exactly as you know, that is exactly the language with which the state described the relation of native trust through the federal government. They were words. Wow. And this is 1889. This is the time of wounded me, man. Like Woodruff is not wrong to think that while we are a dependent or word of the state, we are fit to be murder. Interesting. We know what that looks like.
So those are the stakes. Yeah. Those are the stakes of renouncing polygamy, which is of course an enormous hugely disruptive act. You've been told for however many years, however many decades,
that this is an essential part of the theology of your religion, which you've been willing to
Stick your life on.
last question here about legacy, but before we answer this, I just want to emphasize what is such an
interesting piece of learning for myself. I hope for listeners as well, that the real unique aspect of the story, the theme of this is that the that the morons really related to native of American tribes so much because, of course, their history, that which is written in the golden plates puts them here as essentially native tribes. They're just coming back to where their previous civilization was in their mythology would be the word for me, but I guess their book of
Mormon, you know, states are scripture. Yeah. They're scripture. I'm sorry. Yeah. A fantastic, and this is one of the things that I tried to write about in my book, there's an environmental Australian
“in German. Farmer, I think, writes very well, and intensely for a lot of identification with native”
people who's lands, they, the Mormons, feel they are entitled to, who they will attempt to
colonize and bio philanthropize one, let's say, but whom they also understand to be fellow refugees in an imperial America, but an imperial America that they also want to be a part of because they want to be imperialists. It makes for a fantastically fraught set of relations that stretch as across the whole of the 19th century, the whole of the 19th century. And they've been uniquely good in their relations with native tribes, and no, I mean, they had been better than the federal
government, but of course, that's a tremendously low bar. Yeah. You know, they were part, they were one of the major players in the West. Of course, in the West at the time, there's a lot of warfare between different tribes, a question tribes like the Apache's and the youths have the upper hand, particularly, they, they, they are a route for slave trading, the Mormons are opposed to slave trading, that makes the piyutes and ally of theirs. But ally is a strong word. The piyutes are trying to survive.
There are a lot of talk about the ghost dance. Remember the ghost dance? Sure. In the 1880s, the federal government will repeatedly say the Mormons are behind. Oh, well, the Mormons. Yeah. Because it has an eschatological and redemptive end, and they think that the Mormons are secret, throughout the 19th century, the federal government comes to say the Mormons are secretly in league with the native people to murder them. And in some ways, they were, you know,
they were again in ways. They were totally willing to also murder native people themselves to take land themselves. It's hard to overdescribe the frautness of Mormon native relation in the West in the 19th century. Yeah. You talk, becomes a state in 1896. And that's late. You know, when you consider that California became one in 1850, so almost 40 years earlier, there's a difference between that. But that's because of all these things that had to be legislated and worked out and nailed down
before we're going to give you the state that you're insisting on having. Before you do that, we're going to have to integrate you into the American way of life, which they do. How does the legacy of this rebellion? And now we have completely defined it as an ongoing many
“fascinating aspect of things. The idea of their desert kingdom. How does that all square now?”
That's a great question in certain ways. I'll, the first thing I'll say is I'm the I'm I'm I'm I'm I'll
equip to enter it because my my scholarly adress of the Mormons ends at literally the moment they were announced polygamy. That's them. Okay. Part of the Mormon trajectory that that I'm most interesting though. I think you can see from the Mormon side, it's not entirely unfair to say what had been a vigorously counter-produced of this. Something that understood itself as improving what they would read as the apostasy of American Christianity becomes an essence in another subset.
Oh, American Christianity. Another kind of belief that seems more tolerable. That is better able to sit at the table of American her Christian, which simply had not been before announcing polygamy. That, of course, makes the Mormons a different kind of player on the national stage. And it's a kind of a, if you're me, it's a striking transformation like a people who really were willing to stake their lives on their opposition to the curial United States, become like
avocars of good citizenship. Yeah. And Harold Bloom will call them the American religion.
“Yeah. Huge patriotism. You know, if there's never a place I think as patriotic it's the”
state of Utah. You know, it's the Mormons. The irony is unbelievable. And what's also sort of puzzling is that the Mormons sort of stop living as though they live inside sacred time. But rather they treat the 19th century itself, the moment from 1830 to 1890, as their sacred history. But what that does, there are many effects of that, so there's lots of celebrations
About the sacred history of the Mormons.
kind of kilos. Yeah. Right. And all that you and I have been talking about today was, well, that was
“really not inevitable. And in many respects, it wasn't desired. Yeah. Yeah. And it's almost like that”
was that realization. Yeah. Every religion has, it's, it's a schism, you know, the division within it. Yeah. And then the reunification of it. It seems like that's inevitable for all religions. For, for Mormonism, it's with the country itself. Right. That's the schism. And then when they reunite, it's a different kind of practice all together. And of course, there are a lot of Mormons who do not accept the renunciation of it. I mean, they think it is for cheap and
worldly expedience. And that's where the F-L-D-S fundamentalist Mormon church comes from. And there's plenty of segments and still polygamous. And it's still polygamous West who understand themselves
“precisely as as fundamentalist as not having seated the ground of what to them was essential”
to the theology, to the theology, to the lived theology of Mormonism, right, which was given up in their view for the, the, you know, the cheap and expedient reason of statehood. Yeah. For winter if was like, well, that's going to save our lives. Well, yeah, he's from being annihilated. Nice to
not have the federal government after you, every day of your lives. That's not of a third of the
federal government, bringing your city. Although they have an opinion on the, you know, federal
“forces coming in any given day. Yeah. It's interesting. The irony is rebound and rebound and rebound”
across the 20th century. Sure. Though others are better able to speak of that than I. It's been a joy to talk you. Peter Koviello is a professor of history at the University of Illinois. And we have been discussing his book, make yourselves, gods, Mormons, and the unfinished business of American secularism. What a fascinating book that is to get. Peter, is there a website that we should be looking at, ways to keep track of you? I am the head of the English
Department at UIC in Chicago and you can look, if you put in my name in Chicago, you'll find more than enough about me there. There'll be a line outside your office, Peter. Thank you. What a pleasure. I appreciate so much. Hey, thanks for listening to American history. It, you know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes, dropping Mondays and Thursdays on kinds of content from
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