The Campaign Against the 'Mormon Menace'
A fiery editorial calls for the federal government to outlaw Mormon membership, framing the faith as a cancerous threat to social and moral order.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A Mormon missionary in Washington recently boasted that he had made several new converts while there, girls between the ages of 16 and 20. Converts to what? To a professedly religious organization that teaches that adultery is mandated by the Almighty; which forms concubinage and religious sanction to bastardy; which destroys the home and upholds on its ruins the harem; which places lust above devotion, and blind obedience to priestly edicts before adhesion to and acquiescence in the laws of the land. Our Congress in its wisdom enacts laws for the government of Utah and the overthrowing of polygamy, while all the time the missionaries of a bastard faith from the four corners of the earth are gathering converts into its noxious and leprous embrace. Congress should pass a law making it a felony not only to preach the doctrines of, but to belong to the Mormon Church.
“To this pool of pollution, this rose cancer of society... these young girls are to profess adherence, to be inducted as neophytes.”
This editorial reflects the intense, often bigoted moral panic that characterized federal and territorial attitudes toward the Latter-day Saints in the late 19th century. The demand to criminalize membership based on affiliation rather than specific criminal acts mirrors historical patterns of exclusionary governance often used to marginalize unpopular religious or political groups.
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