In 1879, U.S. Secretary of State William Evarts sent a letter to U.S. diplomatic representatives throughout Europe asking them to do everything in their power to prevent Latter-day Saints from immigrating to the United States.
“All who come to this country for the purpose of affiliating with the Mormon Church,” Evarts explained, “do so with the avowed intention of becoming criminals.”
The U.S. Congress had outlawed polygamy in 1862 and yet members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continued to disobey the law when they entered into plural marriages. Evarts’ circular was thus designed as a preemptive strike, a move to prevent foreign Latter-day Saints from migrating to the United States and becoming lawbreakers. Another member of President Rutherford B. Hayes’ administration supported Evarts’ plan. This Cabinet member “did not consider the Mormon emigrants as any more entitled to respect than so many persons who have been convicted of felony.”
Evarts’ effort to bar Latter-day Saint immigration to the United States did not emerge from a vacuum. Neither has the anti-refugee rhetoric of today.
Haitian refugees are legal migrants to the United States seeking protection and safety for their families. The fearmongering and unsubstantiated accusations leveled against them say more about those who perpetuate such allegations than they do about the refugees themselves.
If you think that your ancestors were immune from such anti-immigrant antagonism because they were white and European, you might need to think again. It was not merely the Hayes administration that denigrated Latter-day Saints in the 19th century. They were persistently castigated as un-American and deviant.
In 1838, in Missouri, for example, the residents of DeWitt in Carroll County asked for aid “in expelling the fanatics, who are mostly aliens by birth, and aliens in principle from the county.” DeWitt residents argued that because “a large portion of the people called Mormons” were from “different parts of the world,” they were justified in “waging a war of extermination” against them or driving them from the state.
Defining Latter-day Saints as degenerate foreigners continued for the rest of the century. In 1856, a reporter from The New York Times surveyed a Latter-day Saint immigrant ship with migrants from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Denmark. Even though these immigrants were white and European, they were nonetheless deemed undesirable because they were Mormon.
The Times declared that “among the whole four hundred and fifty, there was scarcely one face that showed that is possessor was greatly elevated above the animal.” The reporter went on to predict that “if Salt Lake City is wholly peopled by individuals of the average of intellect possessed by the newly arrived emigrants, we should, following the law of depreciation, expect that in a century it would be merely a congregation of apes with tails.”
The following year, U.S. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas said of Utah Territory that “nine-tenths of the inhabitants are aliens by birth who have refused to become naturalized, or to take the oath of allegiance.” Douglas further described the inhabitants of Utah as “outlaws and alien enemies, unfit to exercise the right of self-government.” If the various accusations leveled against the Latter-day Saints proved true, Douglas urged Congress “to apply the knife and cut out this loathsome, disgusting ulcer.”
Not to be outdone, in 1863, Col. Patrick Connor of the U.S. Army described Salt Lake City Latter-day Saints as “a community of traitors, murderers, fanatics and whores.” And, in the 1880s, as Congress debated Chinese exclusion, newspapers across the nation conflated the “Chinese question” and the “Mormon problem.” One California newspaper, for example, ran a headline that declared, “Chinese and Mormons. Two Classes of People who must be Made to Go.”
In 1879, the Deseret News responded to Evarts’ effort to prevent Latter-day Saints from entering the United States. The newspaper called it “absurd to assume that all ‘Mormons’ who emigrate to Utah intend to break the laws of the United States.”
It is equally absurd to suggest that Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs and are solely a drain on public coffers. Immigrants are a boon to the nation’s economy and keep the flame of freedom alight with each new arrival.
What the Deseret News said of Latter-day Saints in 1879 holds true for immigrants today: “Every ‘Mormon’ who comes from a foreign shore and takes the oath of allegiance to this government is an addition to the wealth of the country.”
Rather than the rhetoric of fear that has already threatened to boil over into violence, Haitian refugees deserve a warm welcome and a healing hug. Latter-day Saints, with their own saga of exclusion, along with other Americans, have an opportunity to be stone catchers rather than stone throwers and thereby shape a brighter future out of the lessons of the past.
(W. Paul Reeve) W. Paul Reeve is the Simmons Chair of Mormon Studies at the University of Utah.
W. Paul Reeve is the Simmons Chair of Mormon Studies at the University of Utah.
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