Juanita’s Thoughts

The Raid

In mid-summer Juanita reacted indignantly to the mass arrest of the polygamists of Short Creek. Before dawn on Sunday, July 26, 1953, over a hundred highway patrolmen and deputy sheriffs, mostly from Arizona invaded the tiny settlement on the Utah-Arizona border, entering with red lights flashing and sirens screaming, hoping to take the Mormon fundamentalists by surprise. They found men and women, dressed in their Sunday best, assembled around a flagpole in the schoolyard soberly singing “America.” Arizona judges set up temporary courts and arraigned thirty-one men and fifty-six women. The men were remanded to the Mohave County jail in Kingman, Arizona, and the women, accompanied by 263 children, were parceled out among Mormon families throughout Arizona to await disposition by juvenile courts and social agencies. Jonreed and Verda Lauritzen [Juanita’s friends] were among the five adult residents of Short Creek who were not arrested.

 Juanita’s physician friend Joseph Walker, reacting to coverage in the Los Angeles papers, disparaged the polygamists: “Who cares about their frolicsome fornications and sexual whoopies?” he wrote. “It doesn’t look as tho some future Longfellow will write such a poem about the Short Creekers as he wrote about the Acadians.” Juanita was not in accord with her friend, but she could at least thank him for drawing her attention to Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline.” She soon wrote an essay called “Short Creek: Arizona’s Grand Pre,” and attempted to place it with national magazines. It was not accepted and went into her inactive file. It was nonetheless a remarkable expression of her sympathy for Mormon polygamists. (p. 226-227)

Juanita’s Description of Short Creek

 In it, she described Short Creek as she saw it soon after the raid. “I counted 18 windmills, each furnishing water for a fine garden, a small vineyard, and a few fruit trees. There was corn in the tassel; corn two feet high; corn just coming up; beans were thrifty, grapevines loaded.” It struck her as timelessly agrarian. It could have been “Evangeline’s home town, or …any other village in Arizona or Russia or Peru. Seedtime and harvest, the cycles of the moon, the uncertainty of frost or rain, the daily chores, the home-made entertainment – the basic life strands are of a common color.” She defended the arrested polygamists as decent, moral, hard-working people. “For entertainment they have dances, they have organized an orchestra, they enjoy group singing, they have a home dramatic organization. By most of the measures applied they cannot be classed as anything other than rural folk, isolated but not criminal.” She was especially angry over the permanent separation of parents and children which Arizona proposed, an intervention of the state in the home which created an ominous precedent: “A part of the glory of America,” she declared, “has always been the right to be different, the right to be wrong, even. Always we have protested regimentation of ideas. Parents may be food-faddists, nudists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Shakers, Catholics, Fundamentalist Mormons, but the state has not presumed to supervise the conversations in the home.” (p. 227)

Juanita’s Defense of Vera Black

 In January 1956 Juanita protested the prosecution of Vera Black, a polygamous wife who, because her residence was in Utah, had not been arrested in the raid of July 1953. In 1954, Vera Black had provided a test case for Utah officials who proposed to separate children from parents who would not sign an affidavit promising neither to teach nor practice polygamy. Juanita was present at Short Creek on June 4, 1954, when officers came to transport seven of Black’s eight children to Provo where they would be placed in a foster home. With Juanita’s encouragement, Black insisted on riding to St. George with her children, then on to Cedar City, where by a judge’s order she was evicted from the automobile. An appellate judge soon overturned the order of separation and the children and mother were reunited.

By January 1956 Utah officials had refined their case against Black. After an abortive initial effort, law officers and welfare workers succeeded in transporting Vera Black and her children to Provo, where for more than two hours officials made a last attempt to persuade the woman to renounce polygamy and keep her children. She refused and her children were again placed in a foster home in Provo under orders to have no communication with former loved ones or friends. A photograph in the Daily Herald of January 13 shows the weeping Black and two of her daughters at the heartrending moment of separation.

At home, Juanita followed this development with seething emotion. She wrote a welfare officer in Provo pleading that the children at least be kept together so that the younger children could find support among the older. Of particular concern was a little boy named Wilford whose fragile temperament reminded Juanita of Tony’s. Alluding to the first attempt to separate the Black children from their mother, Juanita wrote: “Only a mother who has nursed along such a frail, sensitive child, could realize what the experience did to Wilford, and how deeply and irreparably he is being injured by this one.”

It was, however, an editorial in the Desert News of Saturday, January 28, entitled “Stamp Out Polygamy,” which triggered Juanita’s full anger. She composed letters to the editors of the Salt Lake and Provo newspapers, which the Tribune obligingly printed and the Deseret News and Daily Herald stolidly ignored. Few statements of her entire life were as eloquent of indignation as her unacknowledged letter to the Deseret News. “That the official organ of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints should approve such a basically cruel and wicked thing as the taking of little children and babies from their mother strains the faith of many, many of us.” Predicting that like action against other polygamists would sunder the Church, she likened it to the treatment of slaves in early America. Never in their most oppressive zeal had federal prosecutors of Mormon polygamists in the nineteenth century attempted to separate mothers from their children. “In trying to stamp out one evil,” she pleaded, “let us not commit another so black that it will shame us for ages to come.”

Juanita’s letters would be published in the March 1956 issue of Truth, a Salt Lake fundamentalist magazine. From California, Samuel W. Taylor – author and maverick grandson of church president John Taylor and son of apostle John W. Taylor – wrote his praise of these letters: “I admire your courage and wish more of us had some of it.” Juanita would shortly write an affirmative review, appearing in the Utah Historical Quarterly, of Taylor’s I Have Six Wives, a factual treatment of a polygamous family in contemporary Utah. Taylor’s book reminded Juanita that the student of nineteenth-century polygamy would find among modern polygamists “a repetition of the same words, the same fervor, and the same aura or religious exaltation which surrounded the Saints before the Manifesto. To these people the forgotten story of the Angel of the Drawn Sword is alive and vital; the sermons of Brigham Young and his contemporaries ring with counsel and command not to be ignored.”

Juanita’s protest in early 1956 of the treatment of Vera Black and her children had no immediate result. It would be with satisfaction but no sense of personal achievement that Juanita would learn in June that Black and her children had been reunited after the woman had unexpectedly reversed her position and agreed to renounce polygamy. Nonetheless, Juanita’s indignation and that of a swelling number of other liberal-minded persons would ultimately effect an undeclared amnesty for Utah’s polygamists. Although legislation prohibiting polygamy remains upon the books, officials today quietly neglect its enforcement.

In January 1956, BYU religion professor Anthony I. Bentley sent Juanita a questionnaire soliciting her opinion on the place of creative thinking within the Church. Initially she was suspicious, for she constantly feared that her written statements, come into the wrong hands, might be used against her in a church court. Though guarded, her response  to the questionnaire was an admirable elaboration of her liberal outlook. Human beings honor God, she asserted, when they fully exploit the intellectual gifts with which he has endowed them. “We should bring the best we have to the consideration of every problem and accept what seems truth to us regardless of dictums from any Authority. By the ‘best we have’ I include not only mental faculties but spiritual intuition. Nor would I exclude the possibility of … reexamination and modification of a conclusion or stand.” For members who might be fearful of freely expressing themselves, she could only adduce her own insistence upon speaking out as a free American. She had, she avowed, repeatedly criticized annoying alterations in church rituals such as the banning of background music from the sacrament service and the military-like regimentation of the deacons who passed the bread and water to the congregation. More important, she would continue to speak out in condemnation of the Church’s treatment of fundamentalists, in particular of its role in the prosecution of Vera Black, which, she went on to assert, was “the most wicked thing that has been done in our state since the Mountain Meadows Massacre.” (p. 246-249)