Books: Polygamist Epic

CHILDREN OF GOD—Vardis Fisher—Harper ($3).

One warm spring day in 1820 a tall, towheaded, 14-year-old farm boy named Joseph Smith stumbled into his parents' log cabin at Palmyra, N. Y., looking as though he had seen a ghost. He had just talked with God in an oak grove. "And it came to pass," reported ragged Joe, "that the Son spake unto me, saying, 'verily, verily, I say unto you, my servant Joseph, that a new church will be established in these latter days and you will be my prophet.' "

Two years later an angel named Moroni appeared to Joe. Introducing himself as one from the lost tribes who had emigrated to South America 600 years before Christ, Moroni told Joe the location of a set of golden plates in a cave near Palmyra. With them would be found a code key, or Urim and Thummim. Four years later, Joe, a giant weighing almost 200, began translating the plates.* He dictated to a schoolteacher named Oliver Cowdery. God, said Joe, had revealed that Cowdery was to put the revelations into fit English. To a prosperous farmer named Harris he transmitted God's revelation that he was to back their publication. (Meanwhile he had convinced a pretty, standoffish girl named Emma that God said she was to marry him.)

Thus originated the Book of Mormon and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Vardis Fisher, a descendant of the Mormons, last week made into a brilliant 769-page Harper Prize Novel, Children of God, this story of Mormons and of their two famed leaders, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

Popular knowledge of Mormons centres on their practice of "celestial marriage," better known as polygamy. Author Fisher makes it plain that the storm over Mormon polygamy was raised by something less pure than moral indignation.

Irate mobs did not denounce Joseph Smith as loafer, drunkard, Satan's instrument, until he had refused to tell the hiding place of the golden plates. After they had dug up most of the Palmyra Hill of Cumorah without finding the gold, they drove him out of New York State. After the Mormon bank in Kirtland, Ohio failed during the panic of 1837, mobs in Ohio, Missouri and Illinois tarred & feathered Smith, lynched his followers. Non-Mormons envied the prosperous, fast-growing Mormon city of Nauvoo, feared a well-trained Mormon army of 5,000 men, and known political influence, which Lincoln and Douglas were glad to curry. Only during the Mormon pogroms that culminated in Joseph Smith's murder by lynch mobs in Carthage, 111. in 1844, was polygamy added for the first time to the list of Mormon iniquities. The charge was true enough, Prophet Smith having secretly married 27 wives.

Some of Author Fisher's Mormonalia:

¶ Prophet Smith always insisted that Mormon troubles were payment for their sins. He rarely approved armed resistance, since God would or would not protect them as He saw fit.

¶ When Prophet Smith's original wife, "Doubting" Emma, became suspicious of increasing recruits to a houseful of so-called foundling women, he sent her to St. Louis to buy supplies. After his murder Emma married a tavern keeper.