Fundamentalists

One morning last week FBI agents broke into a house in Salt Lake City, carted seven people off to jail for living as man and wives. Similar posses in other cities swiftly followed suit. By nightfall State and Federal police had dragged from bedroom & parlor, and jailed 50 men and women in Utah, Idaho, Arizona. It was the biggest raid on polygamists since the orthodox Mormon Church officially outlawed plural marriage in 1890.

The jailees were members of a small (2,500 or so members), dissident sect of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. They are known as the "Fundamentalists." Their leader, 71-year-old Joseph W. Musser, did not deny that he had five wives, 20 children. Other Fundamentalists were said to have as many as six wives, 33 children. Musser predicted that polygamy will some day be permitted in U.S. as boon to surplus women who would otherwise be forced into prostitution.

The big (816,774 members), solidly respectable Mormon Church has learned that polygamy dies hard. Despite Mormon President Wilford Woodruff's 1890 revelation that the world was not yet ripe for plural marriage, there have been periodic polygamous scandals. Many polygamists went underground, kept their plural families in hideaways sometimes known as "lambing grounds." In the last few years the Mormons have expelled more than 200 men and women for polygamy.

The Fundamentalists are a severely secretive group. They build no churches, meet quietly in members' homes. But their unabashed magazine Truth advocates polygamy as a divine command. For the Fundamentalists, who hotly reject President Woodruff's revelation, consider themselves the true disciples of the many-wived Mormon Founding Fathers, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

Last week's polygamy crackdown was prompted by an appeal by Mormon leaders themselves. The polygamists' prosecutor is a tall young Mormon, U.S. Assistant District Attorney John S. Boyden. Since there is no U.S. law against polygamy (except in territories), Boyden invoked the Mann Act, the Lindbergh kidnapping law (against a group who took a 14-year-old girl polygamist to a "lambing ground"), the prohibition against mailing obscene literature, etc. Basis for the raids was a recent test case in which the Government sent Polygamists John and Lola Zenz to prison for terms of five and two years, respectively, under the Mann Act.

Cried Polygamist Rhea Allred Kunz, mother of eight (see cut; back row, third from left): "Plural marriage cannot be stamped out. Regardless of wars and pestilence, there has always been a surplus of worthy women." Cried Polygamist Rulon C. Allred, husband of six: "Polygamy is a hard thing to live and anyone who thinks it is fun just ought to try it."

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