Reviews -- A Mormon Mother: An Autobiography by Annie Clark Tanner



	A Mormon Mother An Autobiography by Annie Clark Tanner

Pacific Historical Review, Fawn W. Brodie
Polygamous relationships have been far more common in America than most social historians concede. The slave society was inevitably polygamous, and the degree to which this was so can be measured in part by the antebellum census statistics which counted mulattoes as distinct from blacks. The early Mormon polygamists, who defended their system as God-given, have long been studied by social historians and psychologists, and Stanley Ivins demonstrated that it was possible even with the defective census statistics to make a fairly accurate counting. Still mysterious, and unstudied, are the Mormon polygamists who continued to marry wives after the official Mormon abandonment of the practice in 1890. And we have only guesses as to the number of "fundamentalists" practicing polygamy today; estimates of the sect run as high as 30,000. American men of all races who have a wife and a mistress simultaneously are obviously impossible to count.

Annie Clark Tanner's memoir, A Mormon Mother, is an especially poignant description of a polygamous relationship which began in 1883 and continued long after the Mormon president, Wilford Woodruff, forbade the practice. This secret life of a second wife has universal overtones, and it is not surprising that Eleanor Roosevelt said after reading it, "I was emotionally exhausted when I had finished."

Ezra Clark, Annie's father, spent six months in the federal penitentiary for "unlawful cohabitation." Ironically, he had opposed his daughter's going into polygamy, but she insisted on becoming the second wife of the talented, handsome Utah educator, Joseph M. Tanner. Married secretly, she spent her wedding night without her husband in her family's home, and did not see him again for two weeks. To prevent his going to prison she "went underground," moving frequently, living under assumed names, meanwhile continuing to bear one child after another. When her husband, in defiance of the Church's 1890 ruling, continued to marry beautiful, talented women, he was dismissed from his university post and fled to a ranch in Canada. An inept speculator, he went through Annie's inheritance, and thereafter she had to make her own way. When she refused to go to Canada, and insisted that their children be properly educated, Tanner repudiated her.

But this book is much more than the story of an indomitable woman who managed under great difficulties to raise and educate nine children, one of them Utah educator Obert C. Tanner, who writes a moving introduction to his mother's narrative. It is also an account of the special social and psychological humiliations of the second wife, and the secret wife, one who was drawn into the system when still sanctioned by the Mormon society, but who suffered special privations when the social approbation slowly disappeared.

Annie Tanner suffered, too, from a growing disillusionment with the religious underpinnings of polygamy, and a conscious realization that many of her humiliations had been suffered for a cause in which she could no longer believe. Eventually she came also to doubt what she had been taught as a child, that women were less than equal to men in intellect and talent.

When writing this memoir in 1941, as an old woman of seventy-seven, she reproduced the evolution of her feelings and intellectual convictions with clarity and eloquence. The book is in no sense an attack on her church. "Our religion," she writes, "gave us power to endure." Her complaints are muted, her restraint extraordinary. Nevertheless, the portrait of her husband that emerges from her recollections, letters, and diary entries is that of a narcissistic, self-indulgent man who abused his wives and children. One suspects that the writing was a catharsis long overdue in her life. The memoir speaks to all women who have shared their husbands with other women, and in a different sense it has a message, too, for all men who have fantasies of the presumed delights of the polygamous life.

Journal of Arizona History, Paul Bailey
This reviewer must confess that he faced Mrs. Tanner's book with reluctance and trepidation. Having digested too many volumes of "faith promoting" spiritual effusions endorsed by the Latter-day Saint "authorities," or hate-pieces aimed at scalping the Mormons, or those hoping to gain mileage by ridiculing the Saints and/or blowing up their cultural mores and plural-marriage history into lascivious sensationalism, I expected this volume to fit at least one niche of the several time-tested patterns. This it did not do so. I found it to be unique, informative, absorbing, and, sort of wonderful.

In 1883, Annie Clark, born into a prominent Utah Mormon polygamous family, married Joseph M. Tanner while both were attending Brigham Young University in Provo. Her husband was a teaching assistant at the college, just stepping into a distinguished educational career that would lead him to Harvard, to the high post of commissioner of education for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to the presidency of Brigham Young College at Logan, and to the same post at Utah State University. That Tanner already had one wife when Annie Clark married him was not considered by her as anything out of the ordinary. Her own mother was married plural. It was the thing to do if one wanted exaltation in the celestial glory.

To complicate things, she honestly loved John Tanner. Worse, the marriage also happened to coincide with the U.S. Government's merciless pogrom against Mormon polygamy—which would end only when, a few years later, the government had filled the western penitentiaries with the "cohabs," had ruthlessly confiscated church property and physical assets, and had forced the Mormon President, Wilford Woodruff, to reveal to his beleaguered Saints the "Manifesto" to which would put instant end—at the price of disfellowship and excommunication—to any brother who further added to his "increase."

Professor Tanner, however, continued with his marryings until his Mormon harem totaled out at six wives—some of them, in spite of the harsh edict, added after the Manifesto. In this remarkable book, Annie Clark Tanner tells how it was to be married plural during the time when one had to hide in the "underground," and when a swollen belly or the blatting cry of an infant meant a fast ticket to Utah Territorial Penitentiary—if not for her, certainly for her husband.

Being one of the Mormon elite, Professor Tanner was able to escape durance vile through a European mission and a sojourn in Mexico. Finally, however, because of his marrying propensities in defiance of Church edict, he was forced to abandon his high educational posts and flee to Canada with thousands of other Mormon "cohabs." In Alberta he traded the classroom for an immense amount of tillable acreage, wiping out Annie's family inheritance and leaving her in poverty with nine tiny children.

In spite of the fact that at least three of his wives had followed Professor Tanner to Canada, and that Annie had a heavy stake in the exodus, she steadfastly refused to leave her own nest in Farmington, Utah. Hers proved to be a life of utmost sacrifice and deprivation. In spite of the fact that Professor Tanner shone with brilliance in Mormon educational history, he seems totally lacking in luster as a husband.

What makes this book so extraordinary is not so much its account of the "plural" turmoil of Mormondom—when it ran head-on into public weal and official censure—but its candid, honest picture of what it was like inside the "plural" conjugal nest with the whole world turned against you. To my knowledge, nothing in Mormon literature begins to approach this recital of what it was like to be caught up in an Old Testament marriage pattern in this strange attempt to weld an ancient social concept into 19th- and 20th-century America. Without rancor, still clinging to the religious faith of her birth, Annie Clark Tanner tells it like it was.

In spite of poverty, defeat, humiliation, her book is a song of triumph. In her fight against unbelievable odds, there was little time to tally the gains—one of them being that her entire covey of children, abandoned by their father, turned out to be the pride of Utah in the educational field and in business pursuits. The book, fashioned by a gifted and enlightened woman, is no skimp-worded diary or journal. It sings, it soars, it is tender and dramatic. To read it is a rare experience, and a pleasure.