As the state officials approached the bleak, cinder-block house, a hostile crowd stared at them coldly. Waiting for them in the doorway stood Vera Black, a tiny, short-haired woman of 42 and one of Leonard Black’s three wives. In the house behind Vera, her eight children waited, dressed in their Sunday best.
They would have to take away the children, the man from the Utah Welfare Department said, unless the Blacks would sign an agreement to 1) give up polygamy and 2) raise the children according to the law, i.e., teach them that polygamy is wrong in the eyes of the state. Thus the state is trying—without having to resort to lengthy and costly court action—to persuade the Blacks and their like-minded neighbors to give up plural marriage. But Vera Black would not be persuaded. In a steady voice, she read a statement to the officials: “Ours is a nation of equal rights before the law. Why should I be required to sign . . . any oath of any kind in order to keep the children I have honorably borne unless all mothers in our state be required to sign an oath?”
The Law of the Land. Later, harried officials did everything they could to make it possible for Vera Black to keep her children, but she stubbornly and tearfully refused to sign the pledge required by the state. There was nothing to do then but take the children (ages four to 19) and place them in foster homes.
Vera Black and most of the other 400 residents of Short Creek on the Utah-Arizona border are called Fundamentalists and believe that multiple marriage is the law of God. What they practice openly (TIME, Aug. 3, 1953) thousands of others throughout the West practice in secret. And this is not surprising, for it is little more than 65 years since aged Wilford Woodruff, fourth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, publicly declared that “my advice to the Latter-Day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land.” The Mormons have condemned plural marriage ever since, and do not recognize the “Fundamentalists” as Mormons.
“It Takes a Real Man.” The Fundamentalists, in turn, look upon Woodruff and his successors as apostates from the Divine Revelations announced by Mormon Founder Joseph Smith in 1831 and again in 1843. One of them told TIME:
“We believe as a people that polygamy is a divine institution. People live this way in heaven . . . Woodruff’s manifesto of 1890 was not a revelation of God. It was a submission to expediency . . . Without plural marriage, men cannot become Gods.
“And it takes a real man to live it. It is not a matter of lust. To take plural wives, a man doubles, triples or quadruples his responsibilities. He has more problems to solve. He must create a home in which harmony and selflessness prevail. He must provide. And it takes a real saint of a woman. She must overcome human weaknesses. In the polygamous home, there can be no jealousy, no selfishness. The whole family must live for the family, not for individuals. The children are finer. They never acquire the pettiness of other children. They live in a home where all are true brothers and sisters and love and serve one another, as God intended it.”
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