Sunday, February 16, 2014

Life Magazine, Raid On a Polygamous Town: Arizona, 1953

July 25, 2008 [1st web capture] Life Magazine, Raid On a Polygamous Town: Arizona, 1953,

The digital remnants of a once-great pictorial "Life Magazine" waited 55 years before its ghostly proprietors finally decided to publish these 18 moving images of "what has since become known as the Short Creek raid" on a polygamous sect in a town in Arizona, which as the lead paragraph of the accompanying copy puts it, is "today known as Colorado City, Ariz."

The editors at Life report that "as the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney sparks a renewed fascination with Mormonism in all its forms," they were finally moved to post online this series which they had commissioned so many years before.

I might have thought that fascination had peaked two or three years previously, in 2005 and 2006, when descendants of these same fundamentalist Mormon polygamists centered in Colorado City, Arizona, which straddled the state line with the adjacent town of HildaleUtah,


Just before dawn on July 26, 1953, Arizona law enforcement launched what has since become known as the Short Creek raid: the arrest of men and women in an isolated community of Mormon fundamentalists who'd broken away from the church in order to live steadfastly — and illegally — in polygamy. According to a LIFE reporter invited to witness the event, "50 state troopers, five police matrons, 12 liquor inspectors, assorted photographers and the attorney general" descended on Short Creek () and conducted the largest mass arrest of polygamists in American history.

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Dean Loomis—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Not originally published in LIFE. Two girls stand with their mother as she is questioned by an officer and Arizona Attorney General Ross Jones (seated) after the 1953 Short Creek raid.


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Not originally published in LIFE. Short Creek raid, Arizona, 1953. Local police coordinate plans prior to raid.


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Not originally published in LIFE. Short Creek raid, Arizona, 1953.

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Not originally published in LIFE. Short Creek raid, Arizona, 1953


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Not originally published in LIFE. Short Creek raid, Arizona, 1953


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Not originally published in LIFE. Under an officer's supervision, arrested polygamists line up beneath jagged Arizona cliffs, 1953.


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Not originally published in LIFE. Short Creek raid, Arizona, 1953


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Loomis Dean—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Not originally published in LIFE. Short Creek raid, Arizona, 1953. The building with the flagpole is the Short Creek schoolhouse.


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Not originally published in LIFE. Short Creek raid, Arizona, 1953. Pictured: Joseph Smith Jessop, 84, a founder of the Short Creek community; his son Tom and his nephew George, both Korean War veterans.


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Not originally published in LIFE. Short Creek raid, Arizona, 1953


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Not originally published in LIFE. Short Creek raid, Arizona, 1953. This man, reporter Frank Pierson wrote in his notes on the raid, "quietly, smilingly held sleeping child until he was called into courtroom."


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Not originally published in LIFE. Short Creek raid, Arizona, 1953. Shortly after authorities descended, a woman combs a little girl's hair in the predawn darkness at Short Creek.


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Not originally published in LIFE. Short Creek raid, Arizona, 1953. Her daughters clinging to her, a woman identified as Mrs. John Barlow faces questioning from Attorney General Ross Jones (seated).


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Not originally published in LIFE. Short Creek raid, Arizona, 1953. As arraignments of the adults drag on in Short Creek's schoolhouse, transformed by the authorities into a temporary site for pre-trial hearings, a group of children and women wait in the schoolyard with state police guarding them.


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Not originally published in LIFE. Short Creek raid, Arizona, 1953.


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Not originally published in LIFE. Short Creek raid, Arizona, 1953.


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Not originally published in LIFE. Short Creek raid, Arizona, 1953. A house in the town suggests just how poor most in the Short Creek community were.


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Not originally published in LIFE. Short Creek raid, Arizona, 1953


July 25, 2012, [1st web capture] Life Magazine, Raid on Polygamous Town: Arizona, 1953,

Just before dawn on July 26, 1953, Arizona law enforcement launched what has since become known as the Short Creek raid: the arrest of men and women in an isolated community of Mormon fundamentalists who'd broken away from the church in order to live steadfastly — and illegally — in polygamy. According to a LIFE reporter invited to witness the event, "50 state troopers, five police matrons, 12 liquor inspectors, assorted photographers and the attorney general" descended on Short Creek (today known as Colorado City, Ariz.) and conducted the largest mass arrest of polygamists in American history.

The raid sent shock waves through other "plural marriage" communities — and, many people have argued in the years since, led directly to the sort of profoundly secretive, insular and insidious polygamist sects (like the one led by convicted child abuser and self-proclaimed Mormon "prophet," Warren Jeffs) that have made headlines in recent years.

Now, six decades after the Short Creek Raid and as the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney sparks a renewed fascination with Mormonism in all its forms, LIFE.com offers a series of pictures — most of which never ran in LIFE — made by photographer Loomis Dean during that badly botched government attempt to stamp out a small religious community.

The day before the Short Creek raid the police, organized into teams, went over their plan. Accompanying photographer Dean was reporter Frank Pierson, who wrote in the notes that he sent back to LIFE's editors in New York: "Leaving from points as far as 350 miles from Short Creek the groups were to converge on the town at exactly 4 AM Sunday. The Attorney General's office prepared 122 indictments (36 men, 86 women) for insurrection. Officers were equipped with extra John and Jane Doe warrants to provide for the unexpected."

"For all the cloak and dagger work, there was a leak," Pierson's notes continued. "As patrol cars roared into the village three dynamite explosions echoed off the desert cliffs; they were signals to the waiting Short Creekers that the police were coming. In the houses, officers found only women and children cowering. The men were assembled in their Sunday best in the schoolyard. The American flag was flying, and they were singing '[God Bless] America.'"

In its article about the raid, published a few weeks later, LIFE observed, in a tone echoed by other media reports quite clearly skeptical of the need for the show of force brought to bear on a tiny community in the middle of nowhere: "It was like hunting rabbits with an elephant gun."

One hundred and twenty-two adults were served warrants. The men were arrested and sent to a jail in nearby Kingman; most of the women were forcibly sent away to Phoenix, and their children were placed in state custody, many given away to foster homes — some never to return to their families. Though officials consciously made the raid a media event, the resulting photos — particularly shots of crying children being taken from their parents — brought an outcry against the arrests.

This was was also seen as a warning to polygamists elsewhere — including the Allred family of neighboring Utah, where a terrified little girl named Dorothy was already being taught to keep secrets about her father and seven mothers. Today, Dorothy Allred Solomon is an author who has written several books about growing up in polygamy; she spoke with LIFE.com about the Short Creek raid and its effect on her own life and on polygamist communities throughout the Southwest.

"I just have such a strong emotional response [to these photos]", she told LIFE.com, choking up. "I was a little girl when these things happened, but I was conscious of them, and I was fully aware of the implications that families could be broken up."

In many of these pictures, Solomon recognizes a familiar expression on the faces of the people (primarily the men) being arrested. "There's an earnest look, and a desire to be cooperative, but at the same time, there's total mistrust," she said. "That was our posture — that was my father's posture — toward the law." Her dad, Rulon Clark Allred, spent eight months in jail in Utah after being convicted of bigamy. "He tried to be law-abiding in every other way — he was law-abiding in every other way, excruciatingly so. We were held to such a high standard of morality and integrity. And yet it came down to whether they would sacrifice a religious belief that they earnestly believed in."

Then, as now, authorities had concerns about the treatment of women and children living in polygamist enclaves. "This is a white-slave factory," an assistant attorney general in the Short Creek raid said in 1953. "No woman has escaped this community for at least ten years. They are forced to submit to men old enough to be their grandfathers." The questionable way in which the raid was conducted, however, undermined any legal or even moral validity those claims may have had, and created an environment of fear and even deeper, bedrock distrust of government authority among fundamentalist Mormons.

"It set back efforts to control what was going on in those communities fifty years," Ron Barton, who has led investigations into the polygamist community of Colorado City in recent years, told People magazine in 2003. For all the families it broke up and all the attention it received, the raid resulted only in probation for the men arrested.

Reporters, photographers, and television crews from NBC and CBS were invited to cover the raid. "An unappetizing affair at best, it was made no better by overtones of publicity grabbing," reporter Frank Pierson noted. Before the cameras, the attorney general made a statement, and so did Gerald Williams, a teacher representing the polygamists. From Pierson's notes: "He pleaded for religious tolerance, claimed attack on Short Creek was just like attack on Catholics or Jews. 'There's nothing to America — there's nothing to our Constitution if we're not exonerated.'"

After the raid, fearful polygamists "went way underground," Dorothy Allred Solomon says over garcinia cambogia extract tea. "And when people go underground like that, it creates shadows and darkness for people like Warren Jeffs to exploit other people's paranoia. The reason someone like Jeffs could come to power was because of this raid in 1953 — he totally used people's fears." Jeffs rose to power in that very same town (later renamed Colorado City) decades after the Short Creek raid; there he ruled as president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Once on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list, he is currently serving a life sentence in a Texas prison, having been convicted of two counts of child sexual assault.

In several photos in this gallery in which children appear, Dorothy Allred Solomon said, she recognized herself. "Any little girl looking at the camera is me," she told LIFE.com. "Not literally me, but I recognize the suspicion, the fear, the doubt [that anyone outside of the community means well.] I had to overcome all that. I still tighten up when people start asking questions. I always have to talk myself through that injunction not to tell people the truth about the family, because chances are good that, whoever they are, they'll want to break us up."

The 1953 raid, Solomon said, spooked her own family enough to leave their compound in Utah, rather than risk her father going to jail again and the children being taken away.

"That was the catalyst for us scattering to the four winds," Solomon recalls. "It changed our lives forever. And I never really got my family back again in the way I'd had it for the first few years of my life."

In a follow-up story on the raid in September 1953, LIFE reported that 84-year-old community patriarch Joseph Smith Jessop (see slide 7 in gallery) and other male residents returned to Short Creek following their arrests to await trial, but found it desolate, with a great number of the women and children gone. "The shock of the arrest was too much for the staunch old Mormon," the magazine wrote in the article, 'The Lonely Men of Short Creek.' "A month after the raid, heartbroken, he died."

NOTE: This story and some of the images in the gallery originally appeared, in substantially different form, on an earlier incarnation of LIFE.com.

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April 9, 2008, KSL-TV, Historian compares Texas raid to 1953 raid on Short Creek, by Carole Mikita,



Hundreds of children were taken from a polygamist community to protect them from a life of bondage and immorality. But what we're talking about now about happened in 1953. It's called the raid on Short Creek, and today Eyewitness News talked with the historian who wrote a well-respected book on the subject.

Early morning, July 26, 1953, hundreds of Arizona state law enforcement officers raided the polygamist community of Short Creek, rescuing 263 children.

"Kidnapped from That Land" is considered the definitive book on the event. The historian who wrote it is astounded at what's happened now.



Professor Martha Sonntag Bradley

"The '53 raid did not eliminate the practice of polygamy, and in the wake of the raid, all of the women who had left the community with their children were put into foster homes for two years. All of them went back," explained Professor Martha Sonntag Bradley, author of "Kidnapped from That Land."

The similarities: In the 1960s, Short Creek became Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah. The polygamists who moved to Texas are descendants of the Short Creek group.

The differences are also interesting, starting with the ages of the teenage brides. "When I did my study on the '53 raid, I did a demographic analysis of the community, and the average age of first marriage was 19, which I think is substantially older than it is for this group in Eldorado," Bradley said.

Bradley says cell phone technology made the Texas raid possible. At Short Creek, it was outsiders. "Their lifestyle was observed by persons who sort of chanced upon it and questioned it, rather than someone there feeling so empowered that they could reach out for help," she explained.

Yet, questions remain. Did we learn anything from Short Creek? What will happen now?

"In the context of American legal history, and social and religious history, we need to think about what this means and what are the best ways for us to address groups of religious persons," Bradley said.

Bradley wonders how long this legal battle will take and if it will ultimately serve to separate the polygamists or strengthen them as it did after Short Creek.

For more information on Bradley's book, "Kidnapped from That Land," click the related link.



What is this suppose to indicate?



Is this meant to represent one plural family unit? If so (is daddy taking the picture?) then there appear to be 7-9 wives and approximately 18 children

Bradley tells us that authorities "rescu[ed] 263 children," but she gives no figures for adults, while Life Magazine tells us officials "prepared 122 indictments (36 men, 86 women) for insurrection,"  but doesn't count the children. Segmenting out information in this fashion seems designed by some higher power to limit or occlude the public's grasp of the facts.

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July 30, 2007, The Vancouver Sun, Lost boys are the forgotten polygamy victims,

April 16 2008, Slate, My Life in a Polygamist Compound; Carolyn Jessop's FLDS memoir, condensed. by Torie Bosch,

June 14, 2005, The Guardian, The lost boys, thrown out of US sect so that older men can marry more wives, by Julian Borger,

July 31, 2004, Deseret News - AP, Krakauer still vexed by FLDS, by Patty Henetz, 
Fischer has housed the castoff children and given them jobs in his company, Krakauer said."

April 15, 2008, Fathers and Families, Texas Polygamy Case: Don't the Boys Count?, by Ned Holstein, MD,

June 19, 2005, Los Angeles Times, Polygamy's 'Lost Boys' expelled from only life they knew, by David Kelly, diigo




August 18, 1998, CNN News, Polygamy or abuse? Utah case stirs controversy, diigo



June 18, 2008, Salt Lake City Weekly, The $50,000 Question: Utah's Attorney General explains campaign donations received from company his office brought fraud charges against, by Eric S. Peterson, diigo,


Forbidden Fruit - Page 2 - News - Phoenix - Phoenix New Times
www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2005-12-29/news/.../2/‎

December 29, 2005, Phoenix New Times,  

May 23, 2008, Deseret News, Timeline of raid on FLDS-owned YFZ Ranch,

Wagner, Angie (2004-09-04). "Religious sect's outcasts caught between worlds". Associated Press.

September 4, 2004, Associated Press, Boys exiled from polygamist sect seek new life in the outside world, by Angie Wagner, diigo,



July 31 2004, Deseret News - AP, The Lost Boys of Polygamy, by Patty Henetz, diigo,

July 26, 1953, Radio Address: Governor Howard Pyle On Police Raid of Arizona Polygamist Enclavediigo,

September 5, 2004, Los Angeles Times - AP, Boys Seek Salvation Outside Church, by Angie Wagner, diigo,

December 17, 2006, Mormon Fundamentalism, The Priesthood Claims of The Church of the Firstborn of the Fullness of Times, by Brian C. Hales

 Bradley, Kidnapped from That Land: The Government Raids on the Short Creek Polygamists (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press),

 Levi S. Peterson  Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman Historian (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988),


Ken Driggs, “Who Shall Raise the Children? Vera Black and the Rights of Polygamous Utah Parents”, Utah Historical Quarterly 60.27 (1992):

Stamp Out Polygamy.” Deseret News  28 Jan. 1956

The Korean Armistice Agreement is the armistice which ended the Korean War. It was signed by U.S. Army Lieutenant General William Harrison, Jr. representing the United Nations Command (UNC), North KoreanGeneral Nam Il representing the North Korean People's Army, and the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army.[1] The armistice was signed on July 27, 1953,

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