Authors: Michael Kranish,Scott Helman
Following the Call
Brother Miles, I want you to take another wife.
—BRIGHAM YOUNG TO MITT ROMNEY’S GREAT-GRANDFATHER IN 1867
“I
believe in my Mormon faith, and I endeavor to live by it. My faith is the faith of my fathers,” Romney said at a moment of grave political peril during his 2008 presidential campaign, a time when he was caught between the need to cultivate the support of Christian evangelicals and the reality that many people viewed Mormonism with skepticism or hostility. “I will be true to them and to my beliefs,” Romney continued. “Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it.”
Forty-two years after Romney’s earnest attempt to explain his faith to the girl he wanted to marry, and almost two hundred years after the religion he professed was born, it was still necessary to explain and justify Mormonism to Americans, or at least to some Americans. Romney, when he entered public life, had long—probably too long—avoided the need to make that case before bowing to the necessity. And the case he made was as general as it was sincere, as if to dip into the core controversy over Mormon beliefs and early practices would only be kindling for further bigotry—as indeed, it might well be. To many people the Mormon story still sounds strange or is simply unknown; even less well known outside the church is the central place of the Romney family in that story.
One reason for that disconnect is that Mitt rarely talked about the special legacy of his ancestors. It is something he has held close, in a deeply private place. But the pride in his standing as one of Mormonism’s first families is plainly there, a fact that was obvious to any visitor to Romney’s home in Belmont, Massachusetts. In the foyer he had mounted framed portraits of five leading Mormon men, all Romneys, all figures who bear introduction if one is to reach into the elusive core of Mitt Romney.
The first face on the wall—long, lean, high-browed—was Miles A. Romney, the man who brought the name to America, the earliest among them to hear the call.
T
he boomtown of Nauvoo, Illinois, rose along a horseshoe bend on the Mississippi River, spreading across the muddy flats and up onto the bluffs, just as its founder had prophesied. By 1841, wagons overburdened with immigrants and their worldly goods rattled down the bustling streets, a great white temple was being constructed on a grassy hillock, and ships filled with still more newcomers pulled into the river dock. The settlers had come with a common goal: to build a haven for believers in a growing new religion, with new saints, new gospels, and a new story of Jesus, called Mormonism. Onto this scene arrived a nearly destitute family with the name of Romney. They came from the quiet village of Lower Penwortham, near Liverpool, England. For years, Romneys had been moving out and on; one named George Romney had gone to London and become a celebrated eighteenth-century portrait painter. But most were of modest means. Such was the case with a carpenter named Miles Archibald Romney and his wife, Elizabeth. One day in 1837, the couple heard a group of Mormon missionaries preach at a town square. The Romneys were so taken with the message that they became one of the first families in Great Britain to convert.
Four years after that first encounter, Miles and Elizabeth had become such fervent believers that they risked everything, emigrated to the United States, and made their way, as instructed, to Nauvoo with as many as five children. They had little money and only a vague idea of what awaited them there, following a prophet’s call. They soon learned of a small stone house that stood in the north end of Nauvoo and, according to family lore, took possession of it in exchange for a paisley shawl.
The Mormon leaders, meanwhile, were overjoyed when they learned that Miles was an expert in carpentry and construction, and they gave him one of the most important jobs in the city, naming him “master mechanic” in the building of the temple. Soon another Romney child was on the way. He would be named Miles Park Romney, and it is this son, known to all as “Miles P.,” who would play a pivotal role in the faith—and later be known as the great-grandfather of Mitt Romney. The journey of the Romneys in America, and the trials of their faith, would unfold largely through his eyes. His was the second portrait in the line on Mitt Romney’s wall.
Nauvoo was in great tumult when, two years after the Romneys arrived, Miles was born on August 18, 1843. The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, had chosen Nauvoo four years earlier as a haven for the faithful after they had been expelled from other areas. But even as the faith grew, so did attacks against it. The story of Mormonism’s beginning came from Smith, who had been born in Vermont and had moved to New York, where he had worked on farms and searched for treasure. He said he had been praying in the woods in 1820 when he saw “a pillar of light exactly over my head.” He said that two “personages” had appeared before him, telling him that other sects “were all wrong” and putting him on a path toward restoring what he regarded as the true Christian faith. Smith said an angel named Moroni had later led him to find golden plates in western New York that he translated into the Book of Mormon, describing how Christ had come to America and how Native Americans were descended from the lost tribe of Israel. This, Smith told his followers, was the true and restored Christian faith. While living in Nauvoo, Smith took multiple wives, a practice some in the faith said was a “divine pronouncement” and a restoration of a practice common in early biblical times. Some historians would later calculate that Smith had taken at least several dozen wives.
Smith’s declaration that other religions were wrong and the fears of some that he would lead a regime of theocratic “despotism” had fueled anger among non-Mormons in the region. His call for a new religious order had led to a chain reaction of violence and exodus; his flock had been kicked out of Ohio and Missouri; and he now talked of making Nauvoo a quasi-independent state. He railed against traditional Christian faiths, Illinois authorities, and the federal government and even declared he was seeking the U.S. presidency. Smith’s gift for oratory had attracted thousands but also repelled nonbelievers. Mobs gathered regularly to attack Mormons.
Then a local newspaper, the
Nauvoo Expositor
, printed accusations that Smith was a tyrant and polygamist. “We are earnestly seeking to explode the vicious principles of Joseph Smith, and those who practice the same abominations and whoredoms,” the newspaper said. Tensions rose, and a series of complaints were made against Smith, who was also the mayor of Nauvoo. The Nauvoo City Council, acting at Smith’s behest, voted that the newspaper’s printing press be destroyed. The town marshal and his men dragged the
Expositor
’s press into the street and pounded it with sledgehammers. Smith was arrested on charges that he had incited a riot. Imprisoned in the summer of 1844 in the nearby town of Carthage, Smith was shot and killed by a mob that stormed the jail; he was dead at age thirty-eight, two decades after receiving what he declared to be a mandate from God.
Members of the faith began to flee Nauvoo, but the Romney family stayed behind, partly to enable the senior Romney to finish his work on the temple. The temple was barely completed when mobs forced Mormons from the city at the “point of a bayonet.” Vandals soon set the temple on fire, destroying the elder Romney’s years of patient craftsmanship. Nauvoo was a sanctuary no longer, and some twenty thousand Mormons deserted a city that had briefly rivaled Chicago in population. The Romney family was too poor to follow the main group of settlers to what Mormon leaders said was the new promised land, later known as Utah. Instead, the Romneys fled to Burlington, Iowa, and then to St. Louis, Missouri. They became part of a wayward band, moving from camp to camp, with few provisions and many sick and malnourished Mormons in need of care. It would be four years before the family had enough money to load an ox-drawn wagon for the westward trek.
Miles P. Romney was seven years old as he made the harrowing journey of 1,300 miles. He traveled over rough trails in often frigid weather under the threat of attack by anti-Mormon mobs, Indians, and wild animals. The Romneys passed through Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming, traveling by pioneer trail landmarks such as the hulking mass of Independence Rock and the massive pillars of Devil’s Gate on the Sweetwater River. Finally, the Romneys descended through Echo Canyon and Emigration Canyon and beheld the Great Salt Lake Valley. In the shadow of the jagged peaks of the Wasatch Range, the valley spread for miles, vast stretches of arid land intersected by creeks and streams, reaching to the 1,700 square miles of the Great Salt Lake. After this journey across the plains, mountains, canyons, and basins, the Romneys settled in Salt Lake City and initially lived in a wagon just like the one in which they had traveled. And the elder Romney soon had a new task for his tools and hands: he began work on the city’s new temple. At last the family began to scrape together a decent living.
Ringed by mountains and remote from other population centers, Salt Lake City seemed like a sanctuary where the outcast Mormons could securely thrive. But as Miles entered his teenage years, the Mormons faced a new threat. In 1856, the Republican Party platform denounced polygamy and slavery as the “twin relics of barbarism.” The following year, amid concerns in Washington that Mormons put their church doctrine above loyalty to the federal government, the U.S. Army was sent to Utah to quell Mormons and ensure federal control of the territory. Miles, fourteen years old, scrambled to join the fight, but he was ordered to remain in Salt Lake City while his older brother George joined the Mormon brigade of perhaps two thousand men in nearby Echo Canyon. The conflict turned into a series of standoffs, and the federal troops eventually retreated, losing a number of soldiers to desertion.
T
he principal flash point was the Mormon practice of polygamy, or plural marriage, as it was also known. Of all the facets of the history of his faith, this is the one Mitt Romney, in his speeches and writings, has said the least about—and he has reason. It is a practice three generations behind him in his own family and long illegal in the United States. He is a devoted family man and finds the whole idea unspeakable and repugnant. “They were trying to build a generation out there in the desert, and so he [Miles P. Romney] took additional wives as he was told to do. And I must admit I can’t imagine anything more awful than polygamy,” Romney has said.
It was a firm repudiation, but again, as in the description of the “faith of his fathers” in his campaign speech, remarkably colorless. Understanding where Mitt Romney fits into the long line of his ancestors requires going deeper than that. For Miles P. Romney’s story is interlaced, to an astonishing degree, with the history of polygamy in the church and in the church’s transition away from it. He was a trusted leader who lived through, and would barely survive, this bloody cataclysm in the early Mormon way.
M
iles had grown into one of the fiercest defenders of his faith, as well as one of the most engaging members of the Romney family. One family member described him as “emotionally high strung” and prone to issuing “scathing denunciations” against those who disagreed with him. Blustery and imposing, Miles bore the family trademark of a long face and high forehead, and he would be remembered for working off his energy by taking to the ballroom floor and acting in theatrical productions, with a preference for playing Hamlet.
When Miles turned eighteen, the Mormon leader, Brigham Young, asked to see him. Young had succeeded Joseph Smith as president of the church, and he was known as the Mormon Moses for having led the exodus of his followers from Nauvoo to Salt Lake City.
Are you married? Young asked Miles.
No, Miles replied.
You must marry as soon as possible, Young said.
Miles was an obedient believer and, as it happened, in love. An “attractive Scotch lass” named Hannah Hood Hill had caught Miles’s eye. She was a nineteen-year-old born near Toronto, Canada, who had arrived as a one-year-old in Nauvoo around the time Miles was born there. In contrast to Miles’s fiery temperament, Hannah was hard to ruffle, a calm yet firm influence.
So it was that on May 10, 1862, at Salt Lake City’s Endowment House, where Mormon rituals were conducted, Miles P. Romney married Hannah. She would bear him ten children and one day be known as the great-grandmother of Mitt Romney. The couple had a month together before the church sent them on their separate ways. Hannah was pregnant when she received the news. Young had ordered that Miles leave for a missionary trip to England, which would keep him apart from his new wife for three years. As Hannah later recalled it, “We had no display at our marriage, nor a very long honeymoon, but our love was for each other and [we] were happy in each other’s society.” When they separated, she felt as though her “only friend” had left her. She supported herself during Miles’s absence by washing “all day from sunup to sundown for a dollar.”
Two months after the marriage, on July 8, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Anti-bigamy Act, which was intended to prohibit polygamy in Utah and the other territories where Mormons had settled. But this was one year into the Civil War, and Lincoln’s true priority was to ensure that Mormons stayed out of that conflict. The president delivered a message via a Mormon courier: “You go back and tell Brigham Young that if he will let me alone I will let him alone.” The antibigamy act was rarely enforced. Miles, meanwhile, was committed to his mission in England to bring converts to the United States, laying out his defense of his religion in a fiery article titled “Persecution.”