The Manifesto, 1890–1904

Plural marriages did continue after 1890. The United States Senate spent four years investigating exactly that, in public, in 1903. Nothing about it waited until 2014 to be admitted.

Start With the Numbers

The Gospel Topics essay The Manifesto and the End of Plural Marriage does not hedge, so neither will this page. After October 1890 plural marriages “continued to be quietly performed” in Mexico and Canada, and “for a time, post-Manifesto plural marriages required the approval of a member of the First Presidency.” That is the Church’s own sentence, published on the Church’s own site.

The essay then does something a cover-up does not do. It counts. Of 315 marriages recorded in one ledger, 25 were plural — 7.9 percent. Eighteen were performed in Mexico, three in Arizona, two in Utah, one in Colorado, and one on a boat in the Pacific Ocean. The dates run from 17 October 1890 to 8 September 1903.

Concede all of it. Did this happen? Plainly it did, and the Church says so itself with a ledger and a percentage attached. So the question worth asking is a different one entirely: did anybody actually have to wait for D. Michael Quinn in 1985, or for a website in 2014, to find any of it out?

The Secret That Was Argued in the United States Senate

They did not.

In 1903 the United States Senate refused to seat Reed Smoot, an apostle elected senator from Utah, and opened hearings into whether Church leaders were still practicing and authorizing plural marriage in defiance of the Manifesto. Those hearings ran for four years. They were front-page news across the country, printed in transcript, argued by attorneys, and followed by a nation that found the subject irresistible. The central allegation was precisely the one the critic now presents as a SUPPRESSED fact: that plural marriages had continued with the sanction of Church leaders after 1890.

And who testified? The President of the Church. Joseph F. Smith took the stand under oath on 28 February and 1 March 1904 and submitted to hostile cross-examination about the marriages, the Manifesto, and the government of the Church. He was handled roughly. The transcript is public and has been public for more than a century.

So consider what the accusation actually requires. A Church that concealed post-Manifesto plural marriage until 2014 — while its own President answered questions about it under oath before the Senate of the United States in 1904, in hearings that lasted four years and filled the newspapers of forty-five states. How does a secret survive that?

What the Church Did About It

In April 1904, in general conference, Joseph F. Smith issued what became known as the Second Manifesto. It was not a clarification memo. It carried a penalty:

Joseph F. Smith, April 1904

“If any officer or member of the Church shall assume to solemnize or enter into any such marriage he will be deemed in transgression against the Church and will be liable to be dealt with according to the rules and regulations thereof and excommunicated therefrom.”

It applied, in the words of the Church’s own manual, EVERYWHERE in the world. That single phrase closed the gap that had allowed the practice to continue: the 1890 Manifesto had been a declaration aimed at the laws of the United States, and some leaders had understood marriages solemnized beyond American jurisdiction to fall outside it. Whatever room for that reading had existed, 1904 removed it.

And then what? The Church enforced it against its own. Two members of the Quorum of the Twelve, John W. Taylor and Matthias F. Cowley, submitted their resignations from the quorum in the aftermath. Taylor was later excommunicated after he insisted on his right to keep performing plural marriages. Cowley was restricted from using his priesthood and afterward acknowledged that he had been “wholly in error.”

Read that again slowly. The institution accused of protecting itself by silencing a historian in 1993 had already stripped two APOSTLES of their seats over this very question, and excommunicated one of them — eighty years earlier, in the full glare of a congressional investigation.

It Was Already in the Curriculum

The claim needs 2014 to be the moment of admission. So what was the Church teaching its own students before then?

Open Church History in the Fulness of Times, the Church’s institute manual, and you find Taylor and Cowley described as having “performed more than a few plural marriages after the Manifesto was issued.” The manual walks through the Smoot hearings, the allegation that leaders were still practicing plural marriage, the Second Manifesto, the resignations, and Taylor’s excommunication. It is a course manual. Young Latter-day Saints were ASSIGNED it. Who exactly was being kept in the dark?

That is the sentence the whole “they buried it until 2014” construction cannot survive. The Church was not forced into an admission by a historian it had punished. It had been printing the substance in its own teaching materials, and the 2014 essay added documentary precision — a ledger, a count, a date range — to a story its curriculum already told.

What Happened to Quinn

This page will not pretend nothing happened to him, because something did, and pretending is the failure mode this whole site exists to correct.

Quinn published “LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904” in Dialogue in the spring of 1985, running nearly a hundred pages. By his own account his temple recommend was withdrawn that May, on the charge of speaking evil of the Lord’s anointed. He left his post at BYU some years later. In September 1993 he was excommunicated, one of the six disciplined that month, summoned on charges of conduct unbecoming a member of the Church and apostasy. He did not attend the council. By his own telling the high council could not agree on the apostasy charge, and the action finally rested on his failure to meet with his priesthood leaders.

Two things follow that the retelling leaves out. The 1993 discipline came EIGHT years after the article and concerned a body of work reaching well past polygamy, including his writing on women and priesthood authority. And did Quinn leave the faith? He never did. He described himself as a BELIEVER for the rest of his life, and he died one in 2021.

Was every step of that handled as it should have been? That question belongs to men who were in the room, and this page does not pretend to sit in judgment on it. What can be settled is the far narrower claim actually being made: that the Church suppressed a finding and then quietly adopted it. Look at the dates and that claim has nowhere to stand.

The Argument Needs a Sequence It Does Not Have

Set the events in order and the accusation dissolves on contact.

The Actual Order of Events

  • 1890 — the Manifesto, aimed at the laws of the United States
  • 1890–1903 — plural marriages continue, chiefly outside US jurisdiction
  • 1903–1907 — the Smoot hearings put the whole question before the US Senate, in public
  • Feb–Mar 1904 — the President of the Church testifies under oath
  • April 1904 — the Second Manifesto, with excommunication attached, applied worldwide
  • 1905–1911 — two apostles leave the Twelve; one is excommunicated
  • before 2014 — the Church’s own institute manual teaches it
  • 2014 — the essay adds the ledger and the count

For “they cast out the historian, then published his findings” to mean anything, the findings have to be secret until he pried them loose. They were not. The Senate of the United States held four years of hearings on them while the men involved were still alive, the Church closed the practice under threat of excommunication and then carried out that threat on an apostle, and the story was in the curriculum long before the essay appeared.

Quinn documented the machinery in detail, and that was real scholarship. Detail is not revelation of a secret. Those are different things, and the argument depends entirely on blurring them.

The Verdict

Plural marriages continued after 1890, some of them with the approval of men in the highest councils, and the Church states this in plain language with numbers attached. Nothing on this page softens that.

What fails is the shape the critic gives it. The shape requires concealment, and there was a four-year congressional investigation. It requires a belated confession in 2014, and there was an institute manual. It requires an institution that protects itself by removing whoever exposes it, and this institution removed two of its own apostles over the very thing it stands accused of hiding — publicly, while the country watched.

Does a church covering something up testify about it under oath? Does it print the penalty in general conference, excommunicate an apostle to enforce the rule, and then assign the whole episode as coursework to its own students? Every one of those is the behaviour of an institution closing a practice down and saying so OUT LOUD.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ has never claimed that the Lord’s servants administer without difficulty, or that a commandment given in one generation is withdrawn without confusion in the next. Peter needed a vision before he understood that the gospel had opened to the Gentiles, and Paul still had to withstand him at Antioch afterward (Galatians 2:11–14). Transitions are hard on the men who have to carry them. That is not evidence against a restoration. It is what every recorded one has looked like.

Take the dates in order and the indictment reads as its own refutation. The record was open the whole time. Somebody just never looked at the years.

Related

On This Site

Sources

  • “The Manifesto and the End of Plural Marriage,” Gospel Topics Essays — source of the ledger figures and the First Presidency approval statement
  • Church History in the Fulness of Times, chapter 36 — institute manual, on Taylor and Cowley, the Smoot hearings, and the Second Manifesto
  • Reed Smoot hearings, 1903–1907 — Church History Topics; Joseph F. Smith testified 28 February – 1 March 1904
  • D. Michael Quinn, “LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904,” Dialogue 18, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 9–105
  • D. Michael Quinn, “Background and Fallout of My 1985 Article,” Sunstone — his own account of the May 1985 temple recommend withdrawal

Citation Traps

  • “In 2014 the Church conceded” — the substance was in the institute manual well before the essay, and before that in four years of Senate testimony. The essay added the ledger, not the fact.
  • “Excommunicated in 1993 for the 1985 article” — eight years separate them, the summons named conduct and apostasy across a much wider body of work, and Quinn did not attend the council. Ask for the charge sheet.
  • “They denied it publicly” — the 1890 Manifesto addressed marriages under United States law. Whether it reached marriages solemnized abroad was genuinely disputed among leaders until 1904 settled it “everywhere in the world.”
  • Quinn as ex-Mormon witness — he never renounced the faith. He identified as a believing Latter-day Saint until his death in 2021, which is not how the argument usually presents him.