RELIGIOUS FREEDOM VERSUS CHILDREN'S RIGHTS:

CHALLENGING MEDIA FRAMING

OF SHORT CREEK, 1953

by

Marion Alison Munn

A thesis submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Science

Department of Communication

The University of Utah

May 2014



Copyright © Marion Alison Munn 2014

All Rights Reserved




The University of Utah Graduate School

STATEMENT OF THESIS APPROVAL

The thesis of Marion Alison Munn has been approved by the following supervisory committee members:

Maureen Mathison , Chair 3/7/2014 Date Approved

Thomas Huckin , Member 3/7/2014 Date Approved

Marouf Hasian , Member 3/7/2014 Date Approved

and by Kent Ono , Chair/Dean of the Department/College/School of Communication and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School.




ABSTRACT

The media’s ability to frame a news story, or to slant it in a particular direction and thereby shape public perceptions, is a powerful tool with implications for material effects in society. In this thesis, a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of the words and photographic images used in the framing of Life magazine’s September 14, 1953 article, “The Lonely Men of Short Creek,” is combined with contextualization of the story within the historical, sociological, and regional settings that may have affected its ideological content. This provides insights into Life’s editorial perspectives and potential audience response. “The Lonely Men of Short Creek” is an account that some writers have suggested contributed to a laissez-faire attitude towards the polygamist community of Short Creek, Arizona, in which a failure to enforce state laws allowed child sexual abuse to continue unhindered there for the next half century. This analysis of Life’s account demonstrates its overall sympathetic framing of Short Creek in 1953, particularly of male community members, and the construction of a narrative with significant absences and misrepresentations that obscured or concealed darker themes. Life’s construct has in certain aspects been replicated today in what some consider to be the

“definitive” account of the story, which repeats a persistent tale of religious persecution, compromised constitutional rights, and an overbearing state’s “kidnap” of the children of an apparently innocent and harmless rural polygamist community. Such a narrative has



deflected attention from an alternative frame—that of a community charged with multiple crimes, including the statutory rape of children manipulated by adults within a religious ideology that demanded plural “wives.” This thesis contends that in 1953, these children were overlooked, or ignored in a fog of often taken-for-granted US national ideologies and editorial perspectives relating to religious freedom and the “sacred” nature of the family in the post-Korean War and Cold War era. Such findings raise questions about the ethics of partisan framing of news stories in which alleged victims are implicated, acceptable limits of religious and family rights, and the often un-interrogated national ideologies sometimes used to justify harmful or criminal behaviors.




TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... vii

Chapters

1. THE STATE, THE PRESS, AND SHORT CREEK ...... 1

Arizona, 1953 ...... 2 Reactions to the State’s Actions ...... 3 Short Creek’s Long Reach ...... 6 The Literature ...... 8

2. TEXTS, METHODS, AND THEORIES ...... 14

Research Texts ...... 14 Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis ...... 17 Symbolism of Words, and Images ...... 20 Ideologies, Ethics, and Materiality of Discourse ...... 23

3. THE STORY ACCORDING TO LIFE ...... 31

Life Magazine September 14, 1953 ...... 31 “The Lonely Men” ...... 32 “Violations” ...... 36 Religion ...... 43 Family ...... 48

4. NATIONAL IDEOLOGIES CONCERNING FAMILY, FREEDOM, AND RELIGION IN AN “AMERICAN CENTURY” ...... 54

Life’s Editorial Policies ...... 55 An “American Century” ...... 56




The American Family, a Bulwark of Democracy ...... 61 Religion, a Manifestation of American Tradition ...... 67

5. COMPETING FRAMES AND THEIR IDEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS, PAST AND PRESENT ...... 76

Victims and Perpetrators ...... 81 Dissonant Ideologies ...... 87 Short Creek’s Legacy ...... 90 Children’s Rights in the United States ...... 96 Responding to Media Frames ...... 98

REFERENCES ...... 101




ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As I complete my thesis and degree, many people deserve my gratitude and acknowledgements. My committee chair, Dr. Maureen Mathison, must be thanked for her keen questions and useful suggestions that helped shape this finished manuscript. Dr.

Thomas Huckin not only shared his immense expertise in the field of Critical Discourse

Analysis, but also showed the relevance of critique as a means of addressing vital issues of social justice. Dr. Marouf Hasian’s classroom culture of rigorous academic expectations, his advice to “critical” scholars to write about matters that are meaningful to them and to society, and his wry sense of humor have made studies in visual rhetoric and rhetorical theory challenging, captivating, and often fun—for me, a perfect combination. In addition, I thank my fellow students, too many to name, who have accompanied and encouraged me on this always fascinating and often challenging journey of learning—I wish you well. My final acknowledgement is to my wonderful children who supported my quest for further education and have demonstrated a faith in my ability that sometimes exceeded my own.



CHAPTER 1

THE STATE, THE PRESS, AND SHORT CREEK

This thesis is concerned with media framing, politics, and ideologies connected to the reporting of an historical event in Short Creek, Arizona in 1953. It questions what became a dominant narrative of religious persecution, compromised constitutional rights, and an overbearing state’s “kidnap” of the children of an apparently innocent and harmless rural polygamist community. It argues that Life magazine’s September 14, 1953 article, “The Lonely Men of Short Creek,” demonstrated a deliberate editorial policy of partisanship combined with an editorial worldview that reflected national ideologies of the time relating to religion, family, and freedom (intensified within the Cold War era).

Life’s overall sympathetic framing of the Short Creek community, in a narrative that contained silences and misrepresentations, served to deflect attention from an alternative frame—that of a community charged with multiple crimes, including the statutory1 rape of child victims manipulated by adults to sustain a religiously mandated obligation to practice polygamy. This thesis contends that Life’s reporting obscured not only the multiple legal charges against the community, but also the plight of the community’s

1 See Arizona revised statutes for the relevant definition of rape under Arizona law from 1939 to at least 1956, “Rape is an act of sexual intercourse accomplished with a female, not the wife of the perpetrator, under any of the following circumstances: 1. Where the female is under 18 years of age” (1956, p. 255).
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children, who virtually disappeared in a fog of often taken-for-granted US national ideologies and editorial perspectives relating to religious freedom and the “sacred” nature of the family in the post-Korean War and Cold War era. This raises vital questions about the ethics of partisan framing of news reports in which alleged victims are implicated, the acceptable limits of religious and family rights, and the often uninterrogated national ideologies sometimes used to justify harmful or criminal behaviors.

This chapter gives an overview of the history of the state of Arizona’s police operation involving the town of Short Creek in 1953, the state’s perspective and rationale for its actions, and some reactions to what happened. Furthermore, it considers the sometimes-conflicting opinions expressed by today’s authors and scholars, and demonstrates the relevance of this story as a subject of analysis.

Arizona, 1953

On July 26, 1953, Governor Howard Pyle of Arizona gave a radio address in which he disclosed that due to various public complaints and judicial pressure from

Superior Court Judge, Jesse W. Faulkner, of Mohave County, he had initiated an extensive inquiry into events in the small, isolated polygamist2 community of Short

Creek on the Arizona-Utah border. The investigation had spanned more than 2 years, and according to Pyle, had uncovered irrefutable evidence of multiple crimes including the forced unions of very young girls (before the age of 15) with often much older men, and

2 The practice under discussion is, in fact, polygyny, (Greek poly-many, gyny wives) in which only males have multiple (female) partners, as opposed to polygamy (Greek, poly-many gamos-union/marriage) in which either sex has multiple partners (dictionary.com). Since polygamy is commonly used when speaking of polygyny, the term polygamy will be used throughout.
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sometimes to men who were already married. Accordingly, the state issued warrants for arrests, and on July 26, 1953—the same day that a Phoenix radio station broadcast Pyle’s speech—a large contingent of police entered the community with the avowed aim of ensuring the safety of the children and taking male offenders into custody. As Pyle

(1953) described it, “Arizona has mobilized and used its total police power3 to protect the lives and future of 263 children” (par. 3). Accompanying the police that day were court officials and a large cohort of the media that Pyle had invited.

In the action, police arrested 36 men and removed them to Kingman, Arizona, for preliminary hearings before they were released on bail. Because of conversations that police overheard at Kingman Jail, which disclosed the men’s plans to release the women and children from the court’s custody and escape with them from Short Creek, the courts gave instructions to remove the women and children from town. Accordingly, on August

1, 1953, 56 women were permitted to accompany their 153 children4 to various accommodations in Phoenix pending investigation of the children’s welfare (“Police,”

1953).

Reactions to the State’s Actions

In spite of the detailed reasons the governor had given for what he described as a rescue of abused and at-risk children, writers have observed that public, and local and national media response was largely negative towards Pyle and the state of Arizona.

Some of the governor’s opponents christened the action “Pyle’s Folly” (Cook, 2008, par.

3 The Arizona Republic reported the operation as involving “more than 100 Arizona Peace Officers” (Nuckolls, 1953, p. 1). 4 The remainder of the 263 children cited by Pyle lived on the Utah side of town and were outside of Arizona’s jurisdiction. See Bradley (1996, p. 137).
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17). One political adversary, Arizona state senator Jim Smith, denounced Arizona’s actions as unjust and an example of large-scale religious persecution. He demanded that state legislators meet to discuss the constitutional rights of all of the state’s citizens, although that meeting never materialized (cited in Bradley, 1996). Tucson’s young

Democrats also made their voices heard, condemning Republican Howard Pyle’s actions as “‘un-American’” (“Tucson Democrats,” 1953, par. 1). This was a particularly damning phrase in its historical context, as will be shown. When Pyle ran again for governor in 1954, and failed, he attributed that failure to Short Creek, saying, “you get killed quicker in government doing your duty than turning your back” (Myers, 1989, p.

93)—an acknowledgement that he saw response to his actions as negative.

Later writers and commentators have offered opinions on the aftermath of

Arizona’s Short Creek operation. Former Attorney General of Utah, Mark Shurtleff

(2010), gave his view that “the governor of Arizona and others were voted out of office because people felt like they were heavy handed in their intervention” (p. 120). Adams

(2006) suggested that a negative response might have not only affected Pyle’s political career, but also the way other officials dealt with the community afterwards. She claimed that “public criticism chilled government enthusiasm for prosecuting polygamy” for years after (Adams, 2006, par. 31). Certainly, polygamy was often the focus of attention, rather than issues concerning child welfare. However, some have claimed that the reluctance of officials to take any further action towards Short Creek had effects beyond simply allowing polygamy to continue unhindered in Arizona. Kelly and Cohn (2006), for instance, asserted, “the episode was seen as ushering in half a century of political
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timidity towards FLDS5 abuse” within the religious community (par. 21). There have been various theories offered for this “timidity.”

To some, members of the public appeared equally as critical of Pyle’s actions as his political rivals were. Commenting on this almost 40 years later, criminal defense lawyer, Ken Driggs (1990), suggested “public reaction to the [1953] raid was often negative and seemed to many people to have crossed from prosecution to persecution”

(par. 63). Gibson (2010) also concluded “the public” had seen the proceedings as a breach of “civil liberties” in interfering with families, and that as a result, there had been

“a general hesitancy on the part of government officials to interfere . . . for nearly fifty years” (p. 282). But was it wholesale public outrage that created this political nervousness, or was it merely policy makers or legislator’s perception that media reporting represented a consensus view of Pyle’s actions? Even if they did recognize that editorial framing (or the angle that the media chose to give to a story) often dictated the tone of a report rather than majority public opinion, they may have still believed that they risked vilification if they intervened in Short Creek. Hostile media attention might harm or even end careers. Whatever officialdom’s perception of what the public thought, although “many people” might have been critical of Pyle (Driggs, 1990, par. 63), “many people” did not necessarily constitute a majority.

Troubling the idea that the public as a whole condemned Pyle’s actions, The

Arizona Republic—Arizona’s foremost newspaper—recorded that its readers in 1953 were approximately equally divided in their opinion on the matter. The newspaper’s editor had penned a caustic attack on nearly every aspect of Pyle’s and the state of

5 The religious group in Short Creek eventually became known as the FLDS, or Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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Arizona’s action against Short Creek (“Editorial,” 1953). When an apparently perplexed governor in a personal letter to his friend and political campaigner, Barry Goldwater, referred to what he called the “insane editorial,” he remarked that “opinion [is] running about three to one in our favor” (“Howard Pyle,” 1953). By the time letters on the subject closed about a week later, The Arizona Republic had notified its readers that of 66 letters in total, “32 defended Governor Pyle” (“Short Creek Score,” 1953, par. 1). There are no statistics available to determine whether this roughly 50-50 ratio changed, and in the absence of polls from the period, it is impossible to tell exactly what overall public opinion was, or what the perceptions of Pyle’s actions were nationally. His failure to be reelected governor indicates that the ratio of political supporters to opponents tipped against him, although there may have been reasons other than the Short Creek operation for this.6 Perhaps more interesting are the potential influences, other than measurable public opinion, that might have affected post-1953 policy makers’ course of action towards Short Creek, and by extension toward the children living there.

Short Creek’s Long Reach

What makes the current analysis of the 1953 event timely are the repeated recent allusions to Short Creek and a renewed interest in the press about the present inheritors of the town’s religious legacy. Shortly after 1953, Short Creek’s leadership renamed the town Colorado City on its Arizona side, and Hildale on the Utah side of the state line

6 There may be other factors for a Democrat failing to be re-elected. Statistics indicate that Arizona was an overwhelmingly Republican State. Of the registered voters in 1950, there were 225,114 Democrats to 50,191 Republicans. In the election that year, Pyle won by a margin of only 3,000 votes. In 1954, he lost by 13,000 votes (Governor, 2013).
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(Benson, 2007). The modern inhabitants, often descendants of the original families, have since designated themselves members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of

Latter-day Saints (FLDS). Their religious leader, Warren Jeffs, whom they consider to be the mouthpiece of God, is currently in prison serving consecutive life sentences due to his perhaps not so unique brand of perversion that turned sexual assault7 of at least two girls aged 12 and 14 into part of a religious ritual intended to make these children his “brides”

(Forsyth, 2011).

Although it is not within the scope of the present study to trace the history of

Short Creek from 1953 to the present, or to make polygamy its prime focus, it is pertinent to draw attention to the connection that some of today’s writers draw between what happened in 1953 and more current dealings within the FLDS. As already indicated, media coverage in 1953 may have contributed to a subsequent laissez-faire approach that permitted child sexual abuse to continue unchecked within Short Creek’s religious community up to the end of the century and even beyond (Murr, 2008; Cook, 2008).

Like Kelly and Cohn (2006) and others, Murr (2008) writing for Newsweek suggested,

“the [1953] raid proved such a disaster that officials ignored polygamists for decades,” and suggested that this policy of nonintervention had implications for continuing child sexual abuse of girls in the FLDS (par. 2). Shurtleff (2010) agreed that “Utah and

7 A summary of statutory rape laws within the United States clarifies that the terms sexual assault and statutory rape are often used synonymously. “Most states do not refer specifically to statutory rape; instead they use designations such as sexual assault and sexual abuse to identify prohibited activity. Regardless of the designation, these crimes are based on the premise that until a person reaches a certain age, he [sic] is legally incapable of consenting to sexual intercourse. Thus, instead of including force as a criminal element, these crimes make it illegal for anyone to engage in sexual intercourse with anyone below a certain age, other than his spouse.” (Norman-Eady, Reinhart, & Martineau, 2013, par. 1)
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Arizona [ignored the problem] for fifty years after ” (p. 120). He saw this as leading to the depredations of a “criminal leader who . . . commit[ted] crimes with impunity”

(Shurtleff, 2010, p. 120). Mike Watkiss (2013), a veteran news reporter who has covered many polygamy stories in the Western United States, concurred with this view and laid some of the blame for continuing abuse on news reporting:

The media has screwed this story up for decades. Life magazine and The Arizona Republic's coverage of the 1953 raid doomed the next several generations to abuse. I have long believed that in that context a guy like Warren Jeffs was an inevitability. (Personal communication, January 19, 2013)

Because of such claims, and owing to the diversity of opinion over the events at Short

Creek, analyzing how the press reported and constructed the story and researching the context in which those texts were produced and received presented not only an intriguing research problem but one with implications for social justice.

The Literature

A large range of literature deals with the history of polygamy within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon, or LDS Church), the religious organization from which the Short Creek community broke away. Some of this literature deals specifically with the 1953 Short Creek story. Adams (2012), for example, discussed how collective memory about what took place might have functioned in creating religious identity for those of its faith. She provided examples of post-1953 artifacts—for example fourth-grade reading material from the community that emphasized a perceived heroism and faith in those members present in 1953 while denigrating Pyle.

LDS historian and academic, Martha Bradley (1996), is recognized as having provided the most detailed and wide-ranging account of the 1953 event in her seminal
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book, Kidnapped From That Land: The Government Raid on the Short Creek

Polygamists (first published in 1993). It was to Bradley that some journalists turned for expert commentary at the time of the 2008 Texas action, with one journalist describing her publication about Short Creek as “the definitive book on the event” (Mikita, 2008).

As such, it has often become a dominant frame for the 1953 story. Bradley’s (1996) book does provide evidence of extensive and detailed research, with its contextualization of polygamy as a religious practice and the history of the establishment of Short Creek; it also includes several chapters dealing specifically with 1953 and the events following

Pyle’s action. Her stated aim was to tell the story from Short Creek’s perspective, which is supported by such terms as “kidnap,” “capture,” and “hostages” when referring to the children who were taken into state’s protective custody, and the mothers who were permitted to accompany them. This is an element of her framing of the story that at least one commentator has noted. Professor of Law at Brigham Young University, Ray Jay

Davis (1995), for instance, observed, “ the title of the book is supportive of the townspeople” (p. 227). He also noted that the term “kidnapped” was also legally inaccurate, since those arrested “were taken into official custody under carefully prepared warrants and detained under judicial proceedings”—none of which could be accurately described as kidnapping under either state or US law (Davis, 1995, p. 227). Bradley

(1996) nevertheless provided a wealth of historical detail about the event and acknowledged the charges of statutory rape, citing some data that supported those charges. Even so, her characterization of what were underage sexual unions as

“marriages” raises questions about her views on the matter. In her “Conclusion” she raised issues concerning Short Creek that my analysis demonstrates are the same as
"! appeared in Life—religious freedom and family rights (Bradley, 1996). Bradley (1996) also indirectly referred to national ideologies by characterizing Pyle’s actions as initiating

“a series of events [that] in many ways contradict what Americanism represents”

(Bradley, 1996, pp. 179-181), which repeats the Young Democrats charge in 1953 that

Pyle’s actions were specifically “un-American.” In Bradley’s (1996) view, the government was attempting to “legislate morality” through prosecuting polygamy in what she described as “coercive reform” (p. 181). She also saw outsiders’ objections to Short

Creek as resulting from the adults’ failure to provide adequate housing, food, and education for their children. However, in her conclusion, there is no allusion to sexual assault or to statutory rape—a surprising omission.

University of Utah law professor, Linda Smith (2010), adopted a view similar to

Bradley’s (1996) in her journal article “Kidnapped from this Land, II,” concentrating on legal aspects of parental rights and religious freedom. Smith (2010) attempted to draw parallels between the religious community at Short Creek and other groups such as the

Amish. She also made comparisons between states’ actions toward the religious group in

Arizona 1953 and in Texas in 2008, suggesting that society overreacts to what she called

“unusual (p. 61) or “unconventional” religions (p. 62). Smith (2010) also proposed an attitude of apparent cultural relativism where the state should try to “understand the children’s experiences in the context of their culture” (p. 67). She concluded that parental rights should not be eroded, that “imminent harm” must be the criterion for state intervention, and that children should not be used as “pawns” to try to enforce “social norms” that society is unable to put into effect (Smith, 2010, p. 68). Smith’s (2010) dismissal of the allegations of former FLDS members against their religious group as
"" simply the complaints of “disaffected former members” (p. 64) is salient in the light of the current study that considers victims, their relative absence in the narrative, or the suppression and inaccurate reporting of their voices.

Because of its findings, this thesis aligns itself with some voices more critical of the Short Creek community and other communities where religious frameworks may act to discourage investigating or prosecuting child abuse. University of Utah law professor,

Amos Guiora (2010), for example, in his journal article “Protecting the Unprotected” deplored what he viewed as a nervousness about prosecuting child sexual abuse within a religious context, and the way in which parental rights apparently trump those of children. Guiora (2010) claimed that “male and female children alike are victims of child abuse and neglect in the name of FLDS religious doctrine” (p. 391), that “sexual contact with a minor” requires legal accountability (p. 392), that religious faith is no justification for these harms, and that fear of being labeled with religious intolerance is no justification for nonintervention. Guiora (2010) did not denigrate religious faith, but emphasized the duties of the state towards children vulnerable to abuse within some religious contexts.

Agreeing with Guiora (2010), Hamilton (2005), a recognized constitutional expert in matters of church and state, also reflected on these issues in her book God vs. the

Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law, which opens with the provocative question, “Did you know that the law permits religious individuals and institutions to harm others?” Her book documents some of these harms and includes two particularly relevant chapters,

“Children” and “Marriage,” that contextualize abuse of children within polygamy and within the religious community under discussion in this study (pp. 12-77). Hamilton
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(2005) noted appeals made to the First Amendment8 by some religious groups “as a shield in prosecutions involving rape and child murder” (p. 10). She concluded that there needed to be a paradigm shift within the US about what the founding fathers actually meant by religious freedom, especially as “religious entities lobby for privileges without regard to their victims” (Hamilton, 2005, p. 305). These points are all highly relevant in the case of the Short Creek community and some of responses to Arizona’s actions.

Like Hamilton (2005), Schwab (2012) also focused on the abuse of children in communities like Short Creek, and concluded, “parents engaging in its practice

[polygamy] should not have their rights protected at the expense of the child’s best interests” (p. 339). Furthermore, her advice to state legislators was to disregard their own fears about being seen as oppressive to religious groups and to place the “safety of its children . . . [before] its concerns about public perceptions of persecution, especially when this perception is unfounded” (p. 341). In the same way as Guiora (2010) and

Hamilton (2005), Schwab (2012) saw the tendency to elevate perceived personal freedoms and parental rights above child rights in religious contexts as potentially detrimental to children.

From the foregoing, it is clear that in the United States, issues of individual or religious freedom and adult rights in relation to children within a system of distinctly

American values remain points of contention affecting the safety and the physical and emotional needs of those children. These concepts are key part of my study. The next chapter will contextualize these issues within a relevant methodological and theoretical

8 The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States declares, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . ” (First Amendment, 2013).
"$ framework. It will first describe the selection of texts for this study and then explain the chosen methodology for analyzing media rhetoric—both words and images—for meaning. This will be followed by theoretical considerations of how media rhetoric and its inherent ideologies exert material effects in society; the significance of “silences” in a narrative; and the ways in which frequently unquestioned national ideologies may affect the perceptions of both press and public.

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CHAPTER 2

TEXTS, METHODS, AND THEORIES

Literature within various disciplines, including history and law, contains multiple allusions to Short Creek 1953, but amongst the various studies, there is no close analysis of any media report from that time. Therefore, this thesis is unique in its Multimodal

Critical Discourse Analysis (Multimodal CDA) of a single significant news magazine article published in Life, September 14, 1953, “The Lonely Men of Short Creek.” This

Multimodal CDA draws upon aspects of linguistics, semiotics, ideological and rhetorical critique, historical approaches, and cognitive psychology, amongst others (van Dijk,

2011; Fairclough, Mulderrig, & Wodak, 2011).

Research Texts

In the early stages of my research, and as a precursor to my analysis, I examined a large number of press artifacts relating to the 1953 Short Creek story that were published in the same year. The Phoenix-based Arizona Republic was chosen for its standing as the newspaper with the largest circulation in Arizona since its inception in 1915 (The Arizona

Republic, 2013). The initial period selected for my research was from July 27, 1953 to the end of that year, when the major events of the Short Creek story appeared in the press
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(Bradley, 1996). However, I extended my search to include July 1 onwards to determine if any hint of the proposed action emerged beforehand. Searching microfilmed copies of all issues of The Arizona Republic from July 1, 1953 to the end of December 1953 entailed reading 183 issues and yielded 32 issues with Short Creek content, although many reports were brief.

My second source was the New York Times, which provided national coverage as the “newspaper of record.” The New York Times articles all appear in digital form in the

ProQuest databases, where the search term “Short Creek” yielded 13 issues, and

“polygamy” an extra two. My third source, and the one eventually selected for a

Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, was Life magazine’s lead article, on September

14, 1953, “The Lonely Men of Short Creek.”

I selected Life’s story as my prime text for three reasons. First, it provided the most extensive coverage within a single story. The original September 14, 1953 copy of

Life that I used for my analysis, and in which “The Lonely Men of Short Creek” appeared, covered a full five pages in a photojournalistic style composed of written text and 11 photographic images. The second reason for selecting this text was the magazine’s importance in the world of publishing. Life has been nominated as arguably “the most influential photojournalism magazine in the world” during the period following World

War II, (Collins, 2013, par. 6). This leads to my third reason for selecting this text. The magazine’s recognized influence in the era under consideration provided a rationale for investigating the claims made by various authors that this particular article was especially significant in influencing opinion and outcomes in 1953, resulting in repercussions that extended into the next century (Cook, 2008; Watkiss, 2013; Weyermann, 2011;
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Goldman, 2008). Watkiss’ (2013) opinion of the article has already been cited. Journalist and author, Debra Weyermann (2011), suggested Life’s news frame as detrimental to

Pyle, writing, “The worst fallout came from the ocean of depressing photographs epitomized by Life magazine’s . . . pictorial essay of the raid and its aftermath” (p. 2). Dr.

Art Remillard (2008), Professor of Religion, emphasized what he also saw as an aura of tragedy in Life’s framing—“A photo spread in Life magazine showed the ‘Lonely Men of

Short Creek’ living forlornly without their missing wives and children” (par. 2). These claims presented interesting questions about Life’s editorial policies, its potential influence, its particular framing of the Short Creek story, possible audience reactions, and the story’s implications for the present day.

Various news reports from 1953, as well as other historical sources, provided historical context for the Short Creek story. To identify any absences, silences, or discrepancies in Life’s reporting, I referred to the July 27, 1953 edition of The Arizona

Republic as a comparison. This edition contained the newspaper’s most extensive coverage of the story on the day after the police action, and included a full transcript of

Governor Pyle’s radio address to the public detailing charges against Short Creek community members, as well his extensive rationale for the state’s actions. The same issue of The Arizona Republic also had the most detailed reporting (in any of the sources studied) of the testimony of one alleged victim of statutory rape. I also referred to this newspaper for pertinent data it published on reader reaction to its highly critical editorial about Pyle’s actions. Historical records show that Governor Pyle monitored The Arizona

Republic to guage press reaction and public response in 1953 (“Howard Pyle,” 1953).
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Because victims are central to this discussion, I included an eyewitness account from a police officer present in Short Creek on July 27, 1953—Captain Emral Ruth

(1989) of the Arizona Highway Patrol. This provided corroborating evidence of the existence of child victims, and a comparison to the state’s claims and to Bradley’s data and comments on that matter. As evidence of the relevance of the Short Creek story today, I also incorporated some present-day press reports and scholarly articles referring to the events in the town in 1953.

Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

After selecting my text, in order to construct plausible theories about its content and how it might have been perceived by its readers, I applied Multimodal CDA to its words and images in order to illuminate its overt and covert messages, and sometimes its underlying ideologies.

To become familiar with the material, I began by reading Life’s article repeatedly.

Barton (2002) described the “rich features” of texts that emerge from this kind of reading, and which provide support for conclusions about a text (pp. 24-27). This methodology is

Huckin’s “holistic reading” (cited in Barton, 2002, pp. 92-99), which yields patterns in the text, and in this case, in its words and images. In this analysis, family and freedom (in particular religious freedom) are the themes that rose to the surface through repeated visual and verbal allusions, and form the core of the investigation as well as providing support for its conclusions. As will be shown, family and religion were equally represented, and interacted and supported each other as distinct manifestations of

American freedom.
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Ideological aspects of a text form a vital element of any “critical” engagement.

Bell (2011) drew attention to the interpretive elements of CDA, which in its critical nature sees its objective as “the content and social import of the texts” (p. 520). In the same way, Huckin (2002b) saw identification of “important social problems,” and an impetus to take action to remedy them, as vitally important to CDA (p. 410). Van Dijk supported this view of a CDA that “focuses on social problems, and especially on the role of discourse in the production and reproduction of power abuse or domination” (cited in

Bell, 2011). Whenever possible, CDA approaches this from a perspective that is consistent with the best interests of the dominated groups (van Dijk cited in Bell, 2011).

Relevant to this latter concept, several questions emerged during my research. Was there a dominated group, and if so, how did Life construct the roles of oppressor and oppressed? Was the state of Arizona the villain of the tale and a minority group of religionists its victims? Alternatively, were there more subtle power dynamics in play and less obvious oppressors and victims that the press either did not fully comprehend, or failed to sufficiently bring to the attention of its readers? Finally, were any of these frames being replicated toady?

Investigating what may not be immediately visible, or looking below the surface of texts, employs the hermeneutics of suspicion to ask probing questions about viewpoints and ideas. This perspective applies equally to words or to mediated images.

When stories appear in the media, whose views and interests are represented? Whose may be supported, or undermined, and whose may be marginalized or omitted altogether?

The analysis within these pages will demonstrate how selective representation affected alleged victims and privileged adult voices.
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“Textual silences” may therefore be as significant as what is seen and included in any discourse (Huckin, 2002a, 2010). Huckin defined textual silence as “the omission of some piece of information that is pertinent to the topic at hand” (2002a, p. 348). The rhetorical effects of silence and omission create a void in which the ostensibly immaterial, paradoxically becomes material. This compels a critic to check for what may be missing as well as for what is present (McKerrow, 1989). Johnstone (2008) also stressed the importance of noticing such absences and called this a process of “learning to

‘de-familiarize’” and “imagine alternative worlds and alternative ways of being, thinking, and talking” (p. 72). What might have been said, and how might such alternatives have led to different outcomes? The analysis within this thesis will show how Life’s omission of material information may have subtly directed its readers towards specific conclusions.

Huckin (2010) suggested four steps to discovering absences in texts (p. 420), which I have incorporated in this study. These are; 1) a familiarity with the subject matter; 2) starting with a broad “corpus of texts;” 3) performing a close reading of “a target text” or texts while noting any obvious omissions in the narrative; and 4) “a critical rhetorical analysis . . . speculating on how they [the texts] might affect the intended reader” (Huckin, 2010, p. 420). These are the processes in this thesis that have led to what are intended to be plausible theories not only about absences and ideologies, but also about the texts in general and their possible effects upon audiences.

My own familiarity with the subject matter stems from an almost life-long study of the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its polygamist offshoots. The Short Creek story in particular has been my focus of research over the last

12 months. As already demonstrated, rather than initially concentrating on a single text,
#! this research began with a large body of texts. Once a target text had been selected, a

“close reading” was accomplished via Multimodal CDA. Together with an historical and sociological contextualization, this analysis revealed its ideological content. CDA itself is rooted in the symbolic nature of textual content.

Symbolism of Words and Images

As already noted, Life’s September 14, 1953 “Lonely Men of Short Creek” story, unlike the other press reports in the original corpus studied, is several pages in length and contains multiple photographic reproductions. This latter aspect made Multimodal CDA a particularly appropriate methodology since it extends CDA beyond written text to include the images that interconnect with words, and provides a systematic approach to both

(Kress, 2010; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Machin & Mayr, 2012).

Viewing both the printed word and images as “texts” draws upon Barthes (1973,

1977) theory of semiotics that considers words as simply agreed upon symbols representing certain meanings, and images in the same way as symbols of abstract concepts for the onlooker (Barthes, 1973, 1977; Kress, 2010; Kress & van Leeuwen,

2001; Machin & Mayr, 2012). Words after all have no inherent meaning, as evidenced by multiple renditions of the same concrete object in varying forms in multiple languages— e.g., shoe, chaussure, zapato, etc.

Scholars since Barthes (1973, 1977) have continued to recognize the semiotic element of images. Communication scholars, Robert Hariman and John Lucaites (2007) for instance, pointed to the usefulness of semiotics in unpacking the meaning of images that they believed could stand alone, independent of words. Edwards and Winkler (1997)
#" investigated the semiotic elements of images, and demonstrated how, within the context of a nation’s history and experiences, they may come to represent significant national ideologies equally as much as do words. Olson, Finnegan, and Hope (2008) acknowledged the power of images within the public sphere, with their rhetorical function of visual persuasion as they reach and affect multiple audiences via circulation.

Similar to Hariman and Lucaites’ (2007) view of images acting independent of words as conductors of meaning, Barthes (1983) also suggested that images might sometimes act as a kind of shorthand, replacing text and explanation. He gave the example of a simple image embodying an abstract idea, through a photographer placing a bookcase in the background of photographic setting to imply the intellectualism of the person in the photograph.

On the other hand, images are not without limitations. Semiotics expert, Umberto

Eco, suggested what he called their “fatal polysemy,” in which a multiplicity of possible interpretations might work against their effectiveness (cited in Campbell & Huxman,

2009, p. 266). This openness of interpretation might mean that an intended message could be lost or overlooked. Stephens (1998) also saw disadvantages to images, specifically still photographs, agreeing with Eco that they “operate under severe handicaps when attempting to embody ideas” particularly if those ideas were complex (p. 68). He instead argued that there are times that words might be more effective than an image when important messages are being conveyed. Stephens (1998) based this on what he claimed to be the greater specificity of a well-chosen word over an image, unless the most blatantly obvious image is used to represent an idea.
##

Combining the power of both words and images, Multimodal CDA advocates like

Machin and Mayr (2012) have demonstrated how rigorous application of tried methodology applied to visual images, combined with the analysis of any accompanying words, may provide clues rendering visual meaning far less ambiguous. Like Eco, these authors acknowledged that images are more open to multiple readings than are words, but unlike Eco, they did not see this as a fatal flaw (Machin & Mayr, 2012). Instead, they provided the methodical approach to both verbal and visual texts (Machin & Mayr, 2012) that I have used here together with a few other tools suggested by various other discourse analysts

Returning to Barthes’ (1977) theory of semiotics, or signs and symbols, images have two aspects—connotative and denotative. The denotative aspects are simply,

“concrete people, places, things and events” (Machin & Mayr, 2012, pp. 49 – 50). To make deeper meaning, or uncover the discourse of an image, requires a critic to consider connotation, or the aspects of the image that symbolically represent abstract ideas or ideologies (Machin & Mayr, 2012). These authors have provided analysts with a range of strategies to uncover sometimes hidden meanings. Of those, and including some suggested by Johnstone (2008), Kress and van Leeuwen (1996), and van Leeuwen

(2008), I utilized modes of analyzing such features as repetition, nomination, lexical choice, implicature, presupposition, perspective, foregrounding, backgrounding, and gaze amongst others. These elements appeared frequently in Life and will be explained within the analysis.

This study also anticipates some of the criticisms leveled against CDA in general.

Blommaert (2005), for instance, noted the valid concern that some analysts might fail to
#$ consider a text within the “social circumstances in which it is produced and consumed”

(p. 31). Other causes for concern have been that CDA might ignore historical contexts, or be restrictive in confining itself to a single text (Blommaert, 2005). In this study, although highlighting one text for the purpose of depth, by referencing others I hope to have provided a more cohesive analysis. In addition, my initial survey of a large corpus of press reports together with additional external sources provide the historical and social context for 1953 that may have affected how the analyzed text was produced, and how it might have been received by its readers.

Ideologies, Ethics, and Materiality of Discourse

During any ideological analysis, it is important to be aware of what Bell (2011) called the critic’s “own ideological preconceptions” (p. 559). In this study, potential bias9 has been offset by the rigorous methods already described, in which the text supports claims based within historical and sociological contexts.

Ideologies are of course implicit to any “critical” approach such as CDA, especially their effects in terms of social justice. In spite of the various debates and controversies that have surrounded ideological criticism within such fields as communication (Cloud & Gunn, 1994; Crowley, 1992; Rosenfield, 1983; Wander, 1983), those practicing “critical” analysis have continued to see significant merit in closely

9 The author has worked as a general volunteer and Educational Adviser with Holding out HELP, a Utah-based nonprofit assisting members of polygamist communities to transition into mainstream society. In this capacity, she has met and worked with ex-members of the FLDS. The author is currently working as a volunteer writer for Sound Choices Coalition (also Utah-based), an advocacy group for victims of abuses within polygamy.

#% examining the ideological content of texts. They have viewed texts not as source material for mere intellectual gymnastics, but with the belief that rhetoric has substantial effects for people, other living entities, and the planet (DeLuca & Peeples, 2006; Foster, 2009;

Huckin, 2002b; McKerrow, 1989: Stephenson, 2009). Therefore, texts are interesting not simply because of the intricacies of their structure or the eloquence of their producers, but also because of the power that they wield in society. In this way, critique becomes not an end in itself, but a means to illuminating social conditions and questions of ethics to bring about change (Anderson, 1993; Condit & Lucaites, 1980; Huckin, 2002b; Owen &

Ehrenhaus, 1993; Rigsby, 1993; Wood & Cox, 1993). Critique then has meaning, because as McKerrow (1989) suggested, it holds out not simply the hope but “the possibility of change” (p. 75). Therefore, identifying potential problems within taken- for-granted ideologies and media practices could ultimately contribute to material changes to society and to the lives of individuals. In consequence, the research contained in this thesis research has specific implications for the well-being of children in one religious community and perhaps for abused children in general within religious contexts.

In adopting what Cloud (1994) called, “the materiality of rhetoric hypothesis” (p.

142) this study accepts words and images as highly influential in forming perceptions of reality that may lead to tangible effects. Johnstone (2008) suggested, “discourse shapes the world” (p. 10). However, although linguistic framing may shape our thought processes, views, and actions, complicating what one might interpret as an overly deterministic view of rhetoric, the alternative view is that discourse is itself “shaped by the world” (Johnstone, 2008, p. 10). This was a notion shared by scholars and theorists of
#& the twentieth century such as Foucault, Burke, Sapir, and Whorf 10 (Johnstone, 2008). In other words, ideologies—current thinking and persistent beliefs already existing in society—may also influence what ideas are expressed and the types of language used

(Johnstone, 2008). This is a concept that is explored in this study, and which forms a part of its conclusions. Ideologies may be renewed and reproduced via a cycle of discourse that reflects the world, while at the same time creating the world. Breaking into this cycle to expose its workings is a part of CDA.

While acknowledging the power of discourse and its material effects, it is also evident that there may be establishable facts existing outside of discursive constructs. As

Cloud (1994) emphasized, “we ought not to sacrifice the notions of practical truth, bodily reality, and material oppression to the tendency to render all experience discursive, as if no one went hungry or died in war” (p. 159). For example, within the context of this study, regardless of discourse or motive, evidence of abused children would provide a rationale for interrogating texts to attempt to discover if, why, and how these children might have been overlooked or obscured.

As Cloud (1994) hinted, some radical interpretations of materiality and discourse exist; for instance, the view of rhetoric as entirely constructive of reality (Laclau &

Mouffe, cited in Cloud, 1994). Baudrillard (1995), for example, argued that the Gulf

War was not an actual event but merely a “hyperreal product of media construction”

(cited in Cloud, 1994, p. 156). Continuing in the same trajectory, others have gone so far as to contend that child abuse exists solely as the result of a rhetorical label and that without discourses “framing pedophilia as a crime or violation” there would be “no real

10 The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis theorizes that an individual’s perceptions of the world are influenced by her language and its structure (Swoyer, 2014).
#' harm . . . done to the child” (Rubin cited in Cloud, 1994, p. 152). This takes arguments for the materiality of rhetoric into the realms of the absurd. This thesis argues instead for a rhetorical materiality demonstrated by its effects on people’s beliefs and their resulting actions.

Cognitive linguists such as George Lakoff (2013) have posited that the link between texts and audience response operates primarily as a cognitive chain reaction in which the brain translates linguistic devices into thought patterns that in turn affect reasoning and ultimately deeds. The outcomes may be significant. Media historian, Jerry

Knudson (1993) for example, suggested that press filtering of events has the potential to change historical outcomes, and that history is concerned not solely with actual events, or what actually happened:

But . . . what people thought was happening, as revealed to them through the means of mass communication, which may have conditioned their subsequent actions. Thus the perception of events as filtered through the press may have changed the historical outcome. (p. 9)

The media’s ability to “frame” a story and potentially shape public opinion is therefore powerful.

Communication scholars have also identified how the media frames stories in ways that affect not only the public’s thinking, but also perhaps even public behavior.

McCombs and Estrada (1997) have suggested that “the media may not only tell us what to think about, they may also tell us how and what to think about it, and perhaps even what to do about it” (p. 247). These observations tend to confirm the materiality of media rhetoric in terms of potential societal outcomes. The specific means of the media exerting influences on its readers or viewers that may result in these concrete actions resides within a variety of choices made during the process of bringing a story to press.
#(

As will be shown in the analysis of Life’s story, an integral part of media framing is in language choice and image selection, or in the aspects of a story that may be accentuated, minimized, included, or omitted. As Entman (1991) explained:

News frames are constructed from and embodied in the keywords, metaphors, concepts, symbols and visual images emphasized in a news narrative. By providing, repeating and thereby reinforcing words and visual images that reference some ideas and not others, frames work to make some ideas more salient in the text, others less so and others entirely invisible. (p. 7)

In Life, examples of foregrounding, silencing, omission, word choice, and specific image selection will be shown to have constructed a very specific frame for its story on Short

Creek that contributed to what later became a dominant narrative. Within this framework of material rhetoric, often-concealed national and regional ideologies exerted subtle forces via powerful cognitive processes initiated by images and words.

While being a substantial influence in promoting specific ideological constructs, the media itself may also be influenced by pervasive ideologies. Communication scholar,

Michael McGee (1980), gave significant insights into the workings of ideology and power in society. He rejected the Marxist notion of a helpless populace manipulated by powerful entities—what he called “hooded puppeteers twisting and turning the masses at will”—and instead proffered an alternative view of ideology as “transcendent,” powerful in its effects on those in positions of authority as much as upon those with little or no political influence (McGee, 1980, p. 5). His vision was of ideologies specific to nations; pervasive and embedded; growing and transforming throughout a nation’s history; existing within discourse; and indicating a society’s worldviews and values (McGee,

1980). McGee (1980) was able to reduce these to “building blocks of ideology” that he named “ideographs,” or “one term sums of an orientation” represented by “slogans” (p.
#)

7). Operating almost unnoticed on the cognitive level, concepts such as freedom or family create social consciousness in a public and a sense of collective identity (McGee,

1980); as “god terms” they are not easily challenged (Weaver, cited in McGee, 1980).

McGee’s (1980) allusion to Weaver’s work (originally published in 1953), and specifically Weaver’s phrase “god terms,” shows the close associations between their theoretical approaches. Weaver (1953) saw “god terms” in a similar way to McGee’s ideographs—as powerful and almost unassailable; defying interrogation, that nevertheless for ethical reasons should be probed for intention (Weaver, 1953). Any ideograph rests on presuppositions—ideological elements that are taken-for-granted meanings that are not explicitly argued since the basis for their acceptance has been built up diachronically, and reinforced or subtly altered synchronously within contemporary events (McGee, 1980). When such ideological shorthand is employed, as McGee (1980) comments, “it is presumed that human beings will react predictably and autonomically”

(pp. 6-7). In this process, there is no question of a necessarily reasoned and rational response, which should suggest caution about too easy acceptance of frameworks in which these ideological constructs are employed.

As this thesis identifies ideologies relating to freedom, religion, and family operating within the Short Creek story, as well as the source of their power, it also shows how an inherent appeal to national beliefs and values might provide a smokescreen hiding other possibly negatively charged personal or group ideologies and motives.

McGee (1980), as other theorists such as Cloud (1994), while viewing national ideologies as organic parts of any society affecting all strata alike did not rule out the potential for manipulations to serve the needs of individuals or groups. He observed that the ideograph
#*

“warrants the use of power, [and] excuses behavior and belief which might otherwise be perceived as eccentric or antisocial” (McGee, 1980, p. 15). In a similar manner, as Condit and Lucaites (1980) stated, ideographs are “social warrants for public actions” (p. 82), and represent “the normative, collective commitments of the members of a public” (pp. xii-xiii). If one intends to question actions, as in this study, one must first interrogate the warrant upon which they are based. Were American notions of religious freedom and the inviolability of the family actually warrants for “antisocial practices” in Short Creek that affected children, and tools through which the community or media were able to manipulate opinion in the religious group’s favor?

An example of cynical manipulation of national values embedded within ideographs is Whillock’s (1994) study of the extremist rhetoric of David Duke, a politician with past ties to the Ku Klux Klan and neo Nazi groups. Although Whillock

(1994) was not explicitly writing about ideographs, she nevertheless noted Duke’s repetition of the phrase, “liberty and justice for all” (pp. 218-220)—two significant ideographs in US culture. For Duke to use liberty and justice was to appropriate their appeal for US citizens. As they focused on these ideographs, they may also have failed to focus on Duke’s personal ideologies that ran counter to these values. This helped to obscure a possibly negative and racist agenda, which if achieved might discriminate against large sections of US society—hardly a promotion of “liberty and justice for all.”

Therefore, in considering invisible but deeply entrenched national ideologies, one must also be aware of additional individual or group ideologies that may be in play (as in the case of the religious community of Short Creek versus the state of Arizona) and possible manipulations of powerful national values as distraction or concealment. Invoking
$! personal and religious freedom for adults may have concealed the fact that these were denied to their children, or that democratic rule may not have been the norm in Short

Creek.

This highlights the importance of contextualization of any discourse, and of looking beyond the words and images used for discourse analysis. As Burke (1996) suggested “if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must also be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality” (p. 45). Images and words may reflect only a single interpretation of circumstances, and deflect attention from other possibilities. US national ideologies in their pervasive and therefore often unquestioned power may act as distractions from establishable facts that exist outside of their grand narratives. Discourse containing invocations of a powerful national ideology such as freedom, or family, may have therefore obscured other, discordant ideologies. This makes a strong case for interrogating texts surrounding such powerful encapsulations of national ideologies, as well as being aware of absences, silences, or presuppositions.

Critical Discourse Analysis, and its inherent ideological criticism, therefore has immense value as a means to social justice through its critique. It provides a method of naming what may have not been previously seen—a means of making the invisible visible—and perhaps even of empowering those who may have been denied an adequate voice in society or in the media. These aspects will be demonstrated through the

Multimodal CDA found in the next chapter, and further shown in the historical contextualization of national ideologies in Chapter 4.

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CHAPTER 3

THE STORY ACCORDING TO LIFE

In this chapter, I describe Life’s physical appearance and the layout of its

September 14, 1953 story on Short Creek. Using appropriate tools and strategies from

Multimodal CDA, I show and discuss Life’s foregrounding of religion and family. Also considered are the overtones of persecution and victimization that contributed to a sympathetic portrayal of the Short Creek community, a generally negative approach to

Governor Pyle and the state of Arizona, and the backgrounding of what at the time were alleged victims of statutory rape. As Huckin (2002b) reminds us, “The ability to cast a story in a certain light is one of the most powerful weapons at an author’s disposal.” This analysis therefore considers how the magazine’s framing of the story may have appeared to audiences, and refers to Governor Pyle’s 1953 radio address and The Arizona

Republic’s coverage of July 27, 1953 to clarify silences or omissions in Life’s reporting.

Life Magazine September 14, 1953

The 1953 copy of Life used for this analysis has large pages measuring 14 by 10 inches. Some color appears on the cover (red) as well as in the several pages of advertisements, although the stories and their images are in black and white. Within the
$# featured article, the photographs occupy significantly more space than the written text.

Because of this, a reader is able to gain some sense of story by merely reading titles and looking at the images and their brief captions. Out of 212 pages, the story under analysis runs from pages 35 to 39, and is the magazine’s lead, or main article, after the contents page. The image on the first page of the Short Creek story occupies over one half of the available space; pages 36 through 37 form a double page spread with six smaller images and a small block of text approximately 9 inches by 2 inches in their center. Page 38 has mainly images and a small block of text approximately 1½ inches by about 4 inches, while page 39, opposite, is the last page in the story and contains a full-page image with a small caption. The major headings are in large, bold, capitalized font almost ¾ inch in height. The size of the images makes them particularly significant, and the boldness of the headings creates eye-catching titles. I consider the first and the last image in greatest depth because of their size, their position in the story, and the way in which they interact to form a cohesive message. How the smaller images and their accompanying written text support the overall message of the story is also analyzed, but in less detail.

“The Lonely Men”

After the tall letters proclaiming the name of the magazine, “Life,” at the top of page 35, what next attracts attention is the large image that occupies over half of the upper part of the page and covers its entire width. Below, the bold, black, capital letters of the title (almost ¾ inch tall) proclaim, “THE LONELY MEN OF SHORT CREEK”

(p. 35). These men are not simply the “Men of Short Creek”—they are “lonely,” an adjective that immediately invites sympathy. Although being “alone” may be a positive
$$ term, being “lonely” is not. The smaller but also bold lettered subtitle in capitals explains,

“THEY AWAIT TRIAL AS A RESULT OF POLYGAMY UPROAR” (p. 35). As the magazine invites us to feel sorry for these men, we are also primed to view the reason for their problems as restricted to “polygamy” (p. 35). “Uproar” suggests confusion, turmoil, and controversy – that there is some kind of debate involved with polygamy, and that there might be more than one opinion on the subject. Placing the word “polygamy” in this position implies that this is the central issue, and that the men’s future court appearances are solely about polygamy, or purporting to have more than one wife.

From the outset of the story, Life invites readers into a sympathetic relationship with the large image above the text on the first page. This is achieved via the prominent and easily read titles, already described, but the framing of the image itself invites a similar response. The visual signifiers, or as Machin and Mayr (2012) categorize them— the “concrete people, places, things and events” (pp. 49-50) are denoted by a man in the foreground standing to our left in front of a kitchen range with pots and pans. He is wearing a light-toned long-sleeved shirt and mid-toned pants, has a dishtowel slung over his shoulder, and is cooking something in a pan. Through an open doorway on the right, we see in the far background a group of 9 men seated at a table in what appears to be a dining area. These elements denote a domestic scene, but perhaps a slightly unusual one.

Photographed in a close-up shot, the figure of the man cooking at the range fills approximately one third of the entire image, suggesting his importance in the story. We are “close” to him, rather than “keeping our distance” (Machin & Mayr, 2012, pp. 97-

99). The side close-up view also helps align the viewer with him in a supportive way, representing him as “one of us” (van Leeuwen, 2008, p. 138) or in a way that invites a
$% shared “viewpoint” (Machin & Mayr, 2012, p. 99). The angle of the shot, taken over his shoulder into the room beyond the kitchen, invites us to share both his perspective of the scene and subtly perhaps even his perspective of the entire Short Creek event. This is a domestic setting, and yet there is a discordant note. In the foregrounded kitchen, instead of seeing what in 1953 would have been the norm—a woman at the range—we see instead a man cooking, apparently for the men seated in the background at the dining table. Accounting for what it calls “the all male atmosphere,” the small caption tells us the reason for this unusual scene – “Their wives in state’s custody”(p. 35). This implies that if these women had been present, they would have been in their “proper” place cooking for the men. The captioning therefore subtly attributes the loneliness and the disruption of family life to the “state [of Arizona]” that has removed the “wives” of these men.

Using the word “wives” is in itself a presupposition, or a taken-for-granted statement of something that might be debatable (Machin & Mayr, 2012). As Huckin has suggested, this may be a manipulative feature of discourse (2002b). Here, “wives” presupposes a legal status that some of the women may not possess, and is perhaps a tacit adoption of the Short Creek perspective that they actually were “wives.” The smaller text in the attached story below the title invites us further into this already sympathetic association. “For men used to having as many as five women and 21 children around the house it was a lonely situation” (p. 35). The repetition of the adjective “lonely” invites us to focus on the word. The writer repeats it once more on the same page, informing us that when the men were “released on bail” they “walked from behind bars into their lonely town” (p. 35). We are invited to see these men as especially lonely because of their
$& polygamous state—perhaps even more lonely than monogamists might have been— because of all the women and children that they had accumulated. Here there is no criticism, implied or otherwise, for their actions; and the title, the image, and the first part of the text help to establish a positive connection between reader and the main characters in the story.

Furthermore, these men are not only “lonely”; on the same page, they are described as carrying “burdens” (p. 35). The “heaviest of their burdens” was what Life claimed was the state’s intention to place the children in “Mormon homes” (p. 35). In the next paragraph, there is another implicit invitation to empathize with these men as fathers, because now they are now not just “lonely, they are also “worried” (p. 35).

“What we are worried about is that we are never going to see our children again” (p. 35), a statement with which most readers might empathize. The men are also “too stunned to comprehend what had happened” (p. 35). Thus, Life’s reporting posits the state’s denial of the right to multiple “wives” and separation from their children as something beyond these men’s comprehension. This construction leads the reader to believe that they can imagine no reason for the actions of the state, nor that they ever envisioned this outcome.

There is no real sense of cause and effect or possible guilt. Instead, there is a sense of inexplicable tragedy or perhaps even innocence on the part of these men, rather than of a situation resulting from law breaking. Readers are invited to look with the eyes of fathers who are “stunned,” “worried,” and “lonely”—a list of adjectives that might elicit sympathy rather than encouraging a detached view of men allegedly guilty of multiple crimes.

$'

“Violations”

In spite of the sense of bewilderment attributed to these men concerning their experiences with the law, Life does include a shortened version of the state’s charges on the first page. “Without making a direct charge of polygamy, the troopers arrested the men on charges of conspiracy to violate a host of laws from statutory rape to misappropriation of school funds” (p. 35). This omits detailing the full list of charges that appeared elsewhere. The Arizona Republic for instance, reported Governor Pyle’s (1953) radio speech in full, part of which named the charges (beyond polygamy) against some of these men:

multiple instances of statutory rape . . . contributing to the delinquency of minors . . . income tax evasion, failure to comply with Arizona’s corporation laws, misappropriation of the school funds, improper use of school facilities, and falsification of public records. (par. 18)

Life’s reporter, however, condenses this list to “conspiracy to violate a host of laws from statutory rape to misappropriation of school funds” (p. 35). This fails to mention

“contributing to the delinquency of a minor … income tax evasion, failure to comply with Arizona’s corporation laws . . . and falsification of public records” (Pyle, 1953, par.

18), information which might have been important to tax payers reading the story. Life also omits Pyle’s (1953) specific wording of “multiple instances of statutory rape,” (par.

19) and instead leaves off the qualifier “multiple instances,” diminishing the impact somewhat. Not only that, “conspiracy to violate a host of laws” might suggest that the charge is that the men merely planned to break the law, not that they were charged with actual crimes that they may have already committed. Moreover, Life also attributed the state’s charges to its motive of forcing the town into bankruptcy, “numerous violations, for which the prosecution will demand heavy fines with the intention of bankrupting the
$( community” (p. 37). This ignored the fact that amongst these charges were those carrying not fines, but stiff prison sentences. Statutory rape in 1953, for instance, carried a prison term of 5 to 10 years (State v Telavera, 1953).

Life does detail some of Pyle’s (1953) serious allegations concerning underage sexual unions. “Governor Howard Pyle accused the community of being ‘unalterably dedicated to the wicked theory that every maturing girl child (usually before she reached the age of 15) should be forced into multiple wifehood with men of all ages’ ” (p. 35).

Nevertheless, diluting the impact of this allegation are several linguistic formulations.

One is the already noted preceding phrase at the beginning of the paragraph—“Without making a direct charge of polygamy.” This phrase lays groundwork for the further implicature that appears later—that other charges might have been a pretext for arresting the men for practicing polygamy.

Before directly implying that the other charges were some kind of ruse, Life continues to emphasize polygamy—“Since the Short Creekers avoided civil marriage ceremonies, it is difficult to convict them of polygamy” (p. 37). This again foregrounds polygamy as the prime concern of the state. It also distracts attention from other aspects of life in Short Creek that might have been of concern to readers—underage sexual relationships in particular. According to Life, the overall problem was of the state not having enough evidence to convict for polygamy. This is accentuated by the first part of the large heading on this double page spread. “LEGAL QUESTIONS,” which presupposes that the legality of the state’s action might be in question (p. 37)—that there might be insufficient grounds or insufficient evidence for arresting the men. Other text in this section adds to the impression of a debate over legality. “In proceeding against the
$) rest of the men of Short Creek, Arizona faced a tricky legal problem” (p. 37). To further reframe the problem as solely concerning polygamy, Life suggests that in response to this

“tricky legal problem” that “the state therefore devised the plan [emphasis mine] of charging Short Creekers with numerous other violations (p. 37). “Devised the plan” is

Life’s most blatant challenge to the soundness or importance of Pyle’s other charges that included statutory rape. It functions to raise questions concerning what may have been justifiable reasons for the arrests.

The way in which Life contrived to cast doubt on the state’s motives, and upon evidence for the multiple crimes that Pyle (1953) had listed in his radio address, was facilitated by its selective reporting. This disregarded the governor’s extensive explanations of both motive and evidence. In The Arizona Republic, the governor had laid out the grounds on which he took action. “Before a single complaint was drawn, or a single warrant prepared, or the first preliminary order for today’s action was issued, we had to be certain beyond the least shadow of doubt” (Pyle, 1953, par. 18). As for motive, the governor had framed the police action, not as a crusade against polygamy but as a way to “protect the lives and future of 263 children” (Pyle, 1953, par. 3). Life did not include this rationale in its reporting, and instead chose to imply that the “other violations” beyond polygamy were an intentional ploy to prosecute the men either with fabricated evidence or with no evidence at all. The verb “devised” implies scheming and conniving, or perhaps even concocting rather than identifying crimes. Furthermore, the actual noun “crime” is not used. Instead, Life uses a milder word. The state’s plan is

“charging Short Creekers with numerous other violations” (p. 37). Rather than “crimes,” or “felonies,” the noun “violations” has the ring of minor infractions such as “traffic
$* violations” for instance, or of petty crimes. This casual term effectively backgrounds and downplays the awkward charges of statutory rape. Thus, the enterprise becomes a matter of legal technicalities and marital practices, rather than considerations of serious harms to children.

Life does not entirely omit the mention of alleged victims after its shortened version of Pyle’s allegations, but does cast doubt on their existence. The paragraph that began with implicature of minor legal technicalities and of trumped up charges to punish the community for its polygamy also undermines and subtly questions the evidence. “Its investigators are collecting evidence, they say, to prove many women were reluctant participants in plural unions—for example that one girl of 17 was almost forced to marry a 70-year-old” (p. 37). It is “they say” interposed directly after the word “evidence,” which might call into question that there is in fact any real evidence. It also implies that the arrests may have been made before evidence was found—“investigators are

[emphasis mine] collecting evidence,” present tense (p. 37). This undercuts Pyle’s

(1953) explanation that the operation came after 26 months of investigation “occupying scores of men and women” because “there had to be absolute certainty” (Pyle, par. 18).

The governor appeared confident that there was absolute certainty, citing

“incontrovertible evidence” and stating that “all doubt is erased when it is realized that in the evidence accumulated there are multiple instances of statutory rape . . .” etc. (Pyle,

1953, par. 19). On the other hand, the wording that Life used might be interpreted to mean that the evidence currently being collected was concerning whether the “women were reluctant participants,” implying that if there was agreement rather than coercion, that there was no crime involved. However, this is also problematic for several reasons.
%!

Following “women” with, “for example that one girl of 17 was almost forced to marry,” carries the presupposition that a 17-year-old was a “woman” rather than the child she was under Arizona law.11 It also implies that consent might validate such unions, without revealing at what ages these “women” became involved in them.

Perhaps the strongest example of omission and backgrounding of victims of statutory rape is Life’s partial and somewhat distorted account of the 17-year-old girl’s testimony. In the passage already cited, that calls into question whether the state had made arrests based on solid evidence for real crimes and implies that a child could consent to such a union, are other significant lexical choices that might align a reader’s perspective with that of the Short Creek men. The passage, “Its investigators are collecting evidence, they say, to prove many women were reluctant participants in plural unions—for example, that one girl of 17 was almost forced to marry a 70 year old man” is followed immediately by “But Short Creekers deny these charges …” (p. 37). Here, sparse details of a potential felony are all too quickly disposed of with a follow up denial that links two notions together—first the possible willing participation of minors, and second, that if there had been the report of a forced (underage) union, it never actually took place. This cursory approach to a serious charge that might be expected to evoke concern, and its juxtaposition with the community’s rapid disavowal, is compounded by absences in the reporting—some of them significant.

One example of a noteworthy absence is Life’s failure to define the difference between legal marriages and illegal or underage unions. Its description of the proposed

11 As already noted, the age of consent in Arizona had been 18 years of age since 1939. See Arizona revised statutes, 1956, pp. 255-256.

%" union of the girl to the “70 year old” presupposes a bona fide marriage in the word

“marry,” which is absent such qualifiers as “pretended” or “purported” that might have cast doubt on its status. Whether this was an intended polygamous union is therefore unclear, although it appears unlikely that in a polygamist community, the 70-year-old proposed groom would have been unmarried. Where there is a qualifier used in discussing this girl’s experience—“almost” before “forced to marry” (p. 37), the phrase still fails to clarify the circumstances. Was there a mistake? Was this some renegade

Short Creek man acting outside of normal protocols? Did someone stop the ceremony because she or he believed it to be wrong, or was there another reason for it not taking place? Although the shortage of detail may have been due to lack of access to the alleged victim, there are other substantial and less understandable absences in the narrative.

A press account from which Life may have obtained some of its details appeared in The Arizona Republic on July 27, 1953, the day after the police action in Short Creek.

This serves to emphasize Life’s important omissions and to clarify how the 17-year-old girl’s testimony—a vital element in the Short Creek story—was effectively both silenced and distorted by the magazine. This is not to say that The Arizona Republic’s reporting gave sufficient weight to such an important account. In a continuation of its front-page story, it relegated the 17-year-old’s poignant words to the foot of an inside page

(Nuckolls, 1953). This is in sharp contrast to the column at the top of the same page, devoted entirely to what amounted to a speech delivered by of one of the arrested men

(Jessop, 1953). The newspaper also failed to publish any follow-up articles examining the implications of what the girl had said. But in spite of these deficits, what The Arizona

Republic did publish demonstrates how Life’s slanted and incomplete reporting in this
%# instance failed to acknowledge an aspect of the Short Creek story that lent weight to

Pyle’s charges of forced polygamous unions and statutory rape. Reporter, Claiborne

Nuckolls (1953) wrote:

No better example of why the raid was necessary could be found than in the pitiful story of an anonymous seventeen year old girl who told authorities that she had been a prisoner in Short Creek all her life. The girl sobbed: ‘I was told I had to marry a 70-year-old man. I told them they could kill me first. They finally gave me a second choice of marrying a 45-year-old man. It was so hopeless I gave up. I was his fourth wife.’ (p. 15)

This presents a different perspective from Life’s “almost forced to marry a 70 year old man,” and shows up several glaring omissions. First, the only reason this intended forced union had not taken place was because the girl had threatened to kill herself. Second,

Short Creek adults or leadership had forced this underage girl into an illegal union with another much older man with other “wives.” Finally, despair had forced this captive of the Short Creek community to finally give in to the demands of some adult or adults, apparently without parental intervention to prevent a daughter from exploitation and sexual abuse.

These serious omissions demonstrate a lack of balanced or accurate reporting.

Furthermore, the result of this journalism was not only the backgrounding and silencing of a child victim, but also her revictimization as a target of those who had already harmed her. After suppressing this girl’s full story, the glib phrase “Short Creekers deny these charges …” (p. 37) implies that this victim is a liar and that other victims are a fabrication. There is no interrogation of the denial. The article then reverts to the characters who are apparently the real victims—the “lonely,” “worried,” “stunned” men, who were “preparing to defend themselves on constitutional grounds” (p. 37).

%$

Religion

On the same page, the pace of Life’s article moves the reader quickly away from statutory rape, and right back to polygamy itself with the suggestion by the Short Creek community that it is the victim of religious persecution and the attempted abrogation of its religious rights. Here, the community frames the practice of polygamy as part of the constitutional right of “worship.” One man states, “The Bill of Rights says we can worship God as we please. My religion is not abridging the rights of others” (p. 37). This of course is an assertion that the community’s child victims might have questioned, and if the 17-year-old girl’s story had been told accurately and in full, perhaps readers of Life might have questioned it too. This reporting also omits a key part of Pyle’s (1953) speech that this girl’s allegations support. He claimed that the children of Short Creek were virtual slaves in a community “dedicated to the production of white slaves who are without hope of escaping this degrading slavery from the moment of their birth” (par. 4) and a community in which children were disposed of as “innocent chattels” (par. 8). To have included all of these salient details and allegations might have provided a slightly different perspective to claims of freedom to “worship” and a religion that did not affect other’s rights and freedoms.

Therefore, this foregrounding of religion positions the before-mentioned “uproar” as simply about a religious “right.” As already shown, Life foregrounded polygamy from the start of its article, and in the process backgrounded or entirely omitted the other criminal charges. This new perspective on polygamy contends that it is not only harmless, but also a constitutional part of freedom of “worship” (p. 37). Here might have been an excellent opportunity for Life to inform its readers of pertinent US law to avoid
%% any perception that the state had breached anyone’s constitutional rights. This was something that Pyle had taken great pains to avoid. Life, however, did not publish his claim that “we have gone to almost unbelievable lengths to insure that the rights of no one are violated or even jeopardized in this action” (Pyle, 1953, par. 23). In 1878, a federal ruling had clarified the “Free Exercise” clause of the constitution. This stated that the US Constitution protected all religious beliefs, but not religious practices judged damaging to US society or to individuals (Reynolds, 1878).

Continuing in the same theme of religious rights, one of the Short Creeker’s, “A

University of Utah graduate” asks, “Whose is the next religion that is going to become unpopular?” (p. 37). The nomination, university graduate, serves to legitimize the individual (Machin & Mayr, 2012) whose question presupposes the debate is about popularity rather than criminal behavior. “Unpopular” is a fairly innocuous word that might be connected with the unpopular student in class with no friends, or with the class intellectual who might be criticized for dressing badly or being socially inept—not the potential rapist. It is an inoffensive word helping to undermine possible objections to elements of religious practice. There is also presupposition in the “is” of “is going to become unpopular” (p. 37), which suggests other religions will inevitably be treated in the same way unless the public stands with the people of Short Creek against state persecution. This sets up a straw man to enlist public support for unrestricted freedom for not simply religious belief, but for any religious practice. If the state refuses this privilege, according to Short Creek’s reasoning, the “Bill of Rights,” pillar of US beliefs and values, is toppled (p. 37).
%&

On the same double page spread are other references to religion and implied religious persecution, unjust disruption of family, and attendant victimage. There is a large heading that runs across the two pages, proclaiming, “LEGAL QUESTIONS, AN

ELDER’S GRAVE, AN EMPTY SCHOOLHOUSE.” Three small images run from left to right across the two pages. The first is of an old man and a little girl, and the center picture, the largest, shows a large group of men, women, and children standing or squatting in a large open-air portrait in front of a desert hillside. The picture on the far right is of five men digging a grave in the same kind of desert scenery, but with tall cliffs in the background.

The “ELDER” in question is “Joseph Smith Jessop,” shown in the photograph at the top left corner (p. 36). We see an old man seated with a child on his lap. The photograph is shot from the waist up against what looks to be an exterior adobe or stone wall. The old man has a long full grey or white beard, and a weathered face. He is wearing dark overalls and a long-sleeved mid-toned shirt. On his lap is a little girl wearing a short-sleeved summer dress, rumpled up above her knees. The child looks unhappy, as if she is about to cry, and is looking away from the viewer to something or someone off camera. The man old man squints into the distance in the other direction.

The weather-beaten look, the open-air portrait, and the overalls suggest someone outside a great deal, and perhaps someone who works on the land—a farmer perhaps, in keeping with a rural community. He looks very old, and the accompanying text in the main body below informs us that he is “eighty-four” in this portrait (p. 36). Life also informs its readers that Jessop is indeed a “farmer” (p. 36). “Nomination” (a description of who a person is) and “functionalization” (what a person does) both humanize and legitimize
%' individuals, allowing readers to see them as “decent” community members (Machin &

Mayr, 2012, p. 81). Here Jessop is given his full name “Joseph Smith Jessop” and defined as “farmer,” “PATRIARCH,” “ELDER,” “Grandpa” and “ a founder of the colony” (pp. 36-37), encouraging readers to see him in a positive light.

To return to the portrait of Jessop, Machin and Mayr (2012) suggest that people

“looking off frame” invite the viewer to “imagine what they are thinking” (p. 72).

Jessop’s impassive gaze into the distance shows a detachment from the discomfort of the child seated on his lap and it is hard to imagine his thoughts. The child however, is looking unhappily out of the frame, perhaps in appeal to someone out of sight. She may be unwilling to be photographed or displeased to be sitting on Jessop’s lap, or possibly both. Since this is photograph was obviously taken some time before the others on the page, previous to Jessop’s death, one must assume that this may have possibly been taken by someone other than a Life photographer. The child who looks so unhappy does not entirely fit Life’s theme, but it was perhaps the only one of Jessop available. Readers simply flipping through this story looking only at the photos might assume that the old man is the child’s grandfather. However, the caption under the photo reveals that the unhappy little girl is “his youngest child Mable Ann, 4” (p. 36), which might be surprising to some readers and also suggest a large discrepancy in age between the father and mother of a 4-year-old, but not necessarily an illegal relationship. Various details about Jessop’s “ huge family” appear in the text, and the images across the top of the page tell a story likely to elicit more sympathy for the community.

The caption immediately under the portrait of 84-year-old Jessop and his 4-year- old daughter reads: “DEATH OF A PATRIARCH,” and goes on to quote Jessop who
%(

“after release from jail” declared, “‘this will probably be my last picture’” (p. 36). Life informs us “a week later he died” (p. 36). We also learn that the center photograph of a large group of people (“101 members of his immediate family”) is of the funeral party, the grave is Jessop’s, and that in the eulogy a grandson had declared, “Grandpa has received a martyr’s crown” (p. 37). The juxtaposition of the information that the old man had been arrested with the news that he died soon after might imply some culpability on the part Governor Pyle and the state of Arizona for the death. Other references in the body of the text below intensify this impression by directly connecting the death to the state’s actions. “The shock of the arrest was too much for the staunch old Mormon. A month after the raid, heartbroken, he died” (p. 36). The descriptors “old” combined with

“heartbroken” add to the sense of tragedy, and might be likely to align readers with

Jessop and the town members. The fact that Jessop “is named for the founder of the

Mormon Church” (p. 36), the suggestion that the old man had died as a result of the police action, and that he had “received a martyr’s crown”(p. 37) are all implicature connecting Pyle’s operation, the old man’s death, and his religious beliefs in a chain of blame. This implies that the governor, the state of Arizona, police, and courts of law have become inquisitors and creators of religious martyrs.

There are allusions to Short Creek’s religious origins throughout the article. Life uses the word “Mormon” seven times, and “Mormonism” once, all of which refer to the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, from which Short Creek is an “heretical splinter” (p. 35). In spite of the “heretical” label, Life nevertheless refers to Jessop, the old man who had recently passed away, as “a staunch [emphasis mine] old Mormon” (p.

37), a positive description. These allusions may have acted in one of two ways for LDS
%) members in Utah or Arizona where Short Creek was situated. There may have been either annoyance at the word “Mormon” being attached to someone outside the official church—especially since they were breaking the law, or perhaps to elicit some empathy for those sharing certain of their beliefs. LDS members would have recognized the portraits of early church presidents, Smith and Taylor, hanging on a wall in one Short

Creek community member’s house, where she sat reading “The Journal of Discourses edited by Brigham Young [former LDS Church president]” (p. 38). LDS members revered these same leaders, and perhaps some of the grandparents or grandparents of those reading the article had been polygamists too. The term “heretical” for other non-

Mormon readers may have suggested a sense of courage, of religious heretics burned at the stake in historical times, thus providing overtones of the United States as a haven for the religiously persecuted, as will be further discussed in the next chapter.

Family

The large heading opposite the last image on the final page of Life’s article continues the theme of religion. “PRAYER AND THE CORN SEASON” sets the tone for the culmination of the narrative, subtly perhaps even conjuring evocative images of

Pilgrim Fathers and Thanksgiving corn. On the final page is the only full-page image in

“The Lonely Men of Short Creek” story. Here is a man, three women, and two young girls in an outdoors setting. In the background is a house largely obscured by a tree that shades the figures, and in the nearer background, two children (girls). In the mid-ground and just off center are two women standing at a table. In front of them and to the left is a seated woman, and in the right foreground, a man half turned towards the viewer, and
%* seated on a rustic bench. There appears to be another child hidden by the man. All are shucking corn.

The signifiers in this image connote a domestic scene. Adults and children are preparing corn by hand in a casual setting. The house in the background and what looks like a kitchen table add to the sense of domesticity and imply that this may be taking place in a garden in front of what could be home to some of the participants. The tree in full leaf, the dappled light on the bench, the fresh corn, and the girls in short-sleeved summer dresses suggest a summer’s day, but the adults are all dressed in long sleeves, and the women in fairly long dresses, which seems unusual for such a task. There is a certain similarity beyond the long sleeves and long dresses of the women, as they all have their hair drawn up and back from their faces. The two girls also have their hair drawn back in braids or a rolled hairstyle. The smiles on the adults’ faces (even if adopted for the benefit of the camera), as well as the quizzical look directed by one woman at the man, give a sense of a shared joke, intimacy, and fun.

In this scene, no direct gaze of anyone in the image addresses the viewer. Not looking directly at the onlooker is what Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) term an “offer image” (p. 124) that does not ask for action or involvement, but merely presents itself to the watcher as something to contemplate (cited in Machin & Mayr, 2012, p. 71). In this image, the participants are either looking down, or at each other. Although the downward gaze might be considered a negative attribute, as in the sense of “feeling down” (Machin

& Mayr, 2012, p. 72), the juxtaposition with relaxed, rather than slumped poses, as well as the adults smiling faces have connotations rather of people at ease (Machin & Mayr,

2012) and of collective enjoyment. The two girls in the background, however, show no
&! sense of being involved in whatever joke the adults shared, since they display neutral expressions and are not smiling or looking toward any other member of the group.

Instead, they look downwards and appear focused on their task of preparing corn. One cannot easily judge their state of mind. The fact that the adults and children are looking inward into the shot, or mirroring each other in downward gazes or similar posture also suggests this is an intimate and closed group (Machin & Mayr, 2012). Working together on the same task also implies an industrious and cooperative group.

Apart from the obvious physical elements of the scene, there is a sense of hierarchy. The two little girls occupy a small part of the background, the women occupy the mid-ground, and the man is in the foreground. The angle of a photograph dictates

“how we engage with people” (Machin and Mayr, 2012, p. 98). Here, the photograph is shot slightly from below, which puts the man’s head above the rest of those in the image.

He occupies about three quarters of the height of the photograph, and is partially out of the frame, so his size and occupied space imply importance. Here there is a clear sense of “up” and “down,” which may denote differences in status (Machin & Mayr, 2012).

The fact that we are looking up at all the people in this image adds to a sense of their power rather than weakness (Machin & Mayr, 2012). In addition, we see the foregrounded man from the side and in close-up, as in the image of the male Short Creek resident cooking breakfast in the first picture in the story. This angle, as previously discussed, is a mode of creating solidarity (van Leeuwen, 2008) or a shared perspective

“indexing togetherness” (Machin & Mayr, 2012, p. 99).

The small caption underneath this prominent full-page image at the end of the article on page 39, “AT HOUSEHOLD CHORES The Mackert family shuck corn for
&" canning,” adds to the photograph’s connotations of domesticity and relatedness. The account on the opposite page reiterates the “family” theme—Mackert “works along with his family canning corn” (p. 38). The caption on the same page under a small photo of three separately posed groups of women, and Mackert standing to one side, reiterates that this is a “household”—“ MACKERT HOUSE includes three women and eight children”

(p. 38). We also see “the Clyde Mackerts . . . singing at an organ in their living room” (p.

38). This is evidently a “longtime tradition,” to which is added the information that

“children also recite” adding to a sense of stable and respectable family life (p. 38).

In this way, “family” is a foregrounded and repeated theme. Within a short portion of text on these last two pages of Life’s article, “family” is repeated four times;

“house,” or “household,” or “households,” four times; “husband” or “husbands,” twice;

“children” twice, and “wife” once (pp. 38-39). On the previous pages, “family” appears three times, “children” five times, alongside “sons,” “son,” “posterity,” “Grandpa,”

“grandchildren,” “great-grandchildren,” and “daughters.” As Machin and Mayr (2012) suggest, words put into association with “home” and “family” connote “the family as something safe, stable, and common to all of us. It communicates something that should be protected (p. 32). In Life’s reporting, the Short Creek families appear as something to be protected from an external danger.

As the reader focuses on comfortable and nonthreatening domestic and rural scenes—food preparation, posing for photos, and singing together—we are reminded that here “family life still goes on” (p. 38). Mackert’s “household is living much as it did before the raid” on the Utah side of town, because “his family was beyond …[the] jurisdiction of the state of Arizona” (p. 38). Life’s reporting, therefore, promotes a
&# powerful image of stable and positive family life in the community. The clear implication here is that the “state of Arizona” is the disruptor of pleasant, harmless, and wholesome family. Phrases such as “In a few Short Creek households the family life [emphasis added] goes on” (p. 38) also imply that for the rest of Short Creek, family life does not go on because of the state’s and Pyle’s actions.

What is absent in any of these images is any sign of the possible economic toll that polygamy might have taken upon the women, children, and men pictured. In the pages of Life, there are no overall views of a town that The Arizona Republic described as presenting “ a shocking poverty-stricken appearance” (1953, p. 15). If included, such images might have proved disruptive to the magazine’s narrative.

This final full-page image together with explanatory text provides a perfect foil to the other pages and the aura of tragedy and victimization such as the images of Jessop’s grave and his family mourning over his death. This final image of the story provides a counterpoint to the first photograph at its beginning—those “lonely men” bereft of multiple women and children (p. 35). In contrast to Mackert’s “household,” the families of the “lonely men” cannot eat together, work together, sing together, or do any of the other delightful things that Mackert and his women and children do. The Short Creek schoolhouse is virtually empty because their children are absent and their women have been submitted to questioning by the state. A sentimental photo of a “DESERTED

PUPPY” sitting in the middle of a “deserted main street” also attributes this minor tragedy to the state, since “his young master was taken by the troopers to Phoenix” (p.

37).
&$

In contrast to all this misery, the “Mackert family” is an outwardly happy group presided over by an ostensibly respectable “University of Utah graduate,”

“schoolteacher,” former “paratrooper,” and “farmer” (pp. 38-39). There are no obvious victims here, although we have no idea of the state of mind or condition of the girls pictured. This is a complete “family” (undisrupted by the state). The entire effect of Life’s article is a visual and verbal refutation of what charges are reported in the magazine, although this relies to some extent on omissions of many pertinent details as has been discussed. The general effect is to brush aside uncomfortable or discordant discourses, and instead create a narrative of the victimization and persecution of a harmless group of

“unpopular” old-time religionists living wholesome family lives in a rural farming community. This left the child victims without a voice in the pages of the most influential magazine in the nation.

The following chapter considers the historical and social contexts that may have influenced public perceptions of the events in Short Creek 1953, as well as Life’s reporting style and choices. Synchronic and diachronic influences at global, national, and local levels affected the often unseen power of national ideologies, which as McGee

(1990) observed might be unquestioned and used to justify what he termed “antisocial behaviors.” These affected perceptions of religion and family in that era and served to deflect attention from the ideological constructs in Short Creek that negatively affected its children.

&%

CHAPTER

NATIONAL IDEOLOGIES CONCERNING FAMILY,

FREEDOM, AND RELIGION IN AN

“AMERICAN CENTURY”

Since no discourse exists in an ideological or sociological vacuum, it is pertinent to examine not only the ways in which Life’s reporters and photographers may have influenced its readers and thus American society, but also how Life’s reporting in its turn may have been affected by internal and external forces. As Knudson (1993) observed, it is important not to take approaches that “wrench a newspaper [or magazine] out of the context of its time” (p. 10). Why Life chose to frame the story as it did and how the public might have entertained its words and images becomes clearer through examining contextual influences and taken-for-granted ideologies and beliefs from 1953. These were sometimes represented in terms of ultimate good and virtue, or in charismatic expressions like family or freedom—“god terms” (Weaver, 1953), or in “devil terms” representing ultimate bad, such as communist (Weaver, 1953). These were embedded within American culture, unnoticed, uncontested, and modified or intensified by contemporary and historic influences (Weaver, 1953). These connected across time to the United States history of independence and religious freedom; and more directly in
&&

1953 with US involvement in World War II, the Korean War, and the ensuing Cold War.

There was also local contextualization in the history of Mormonism in the region, particularly in Arizona and Utah. These all had a bearing on the telling and the reception of the Short Creek story.

Life’s Editorial Policies

Although some may debate this study’s conclusion that Life’s reporting of the

Short Creek story was one-sided, evidence suggests that partiality was the norm for the magazine. Those who knew Life intimately as employees of its editor-in-chief and owner,

Henry Luce, claimed that he encouraged his editors to take sides in reporting a story—to

Luce, journalistic objectivity was a myth (Whitman, 1967). Luce insisted, “we tell the truth as we see it,” and this usually amounted to telling the truth as he saw it (Whitman,

1967, par. 4).

Luce’s editorial vision directed all aspects of how the magazine reported a story, sometimes to the frustration of notable photographers of the past, such as Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams, who disliked what they saw to be a manipulation of their photographic material for overly deterministic editorial ends (Doss, 2011). One of Life’s picture editors described the process of putting together a story, demonstrating how choosing what story to tell and selecting only the images that told it was the prime directive.

Having determined the story he wishes to tell, the editor selects those pictures which relate themselves most readily and effectively to other pictures in developing the story’s theme or advancing its action . . . In addition to answering the question, ‘Does the picture say what it is intended to say?’ the editor asks ‘Does it say what I want it to say? [emphasis added]’” (Hicks cited in Doss, 2011, p. 17)

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There was nothing haphazard in how Life chose what to include or exclude in its stories, or how its editors designated images that appropriately interrelated in portraying the overriding editorial stance. As one of the magazine’s editors stated, of supreme importance were “the points made” by the images (Hicks cited in Doss, 2001, p. 11). This is more than apparent in the September 14, 1953 Short Creek story in which the chosen images form a clearly cohesive discourse. Under Luce and his subeditors’ direction, the magazine reflected Luce’s personal beliefs and ideologies and shaped “popular opinion— or the opinions that Luce and his fellow staffers wanted to be popular” (Doss, 2001, p.

11).

An “American Century”

In 1941, Luce had defined his view of the 1900s as one of an “American

Century,” suggesting a commitment to the preeminence of American values, beliefs, and way of life (cited in Whitman, 1967, par. 6). These concepts appeared in the pages of

Life in what Doss (2011) described as “nationalism, capitalism, classlessness, confidence, optimism, and exceptionalism, and the sure belief that the American way of life was the way of the world” (p. 11). In his “American Century” story in Life, Luce identified what he held most dear, defining them as “some things in this country that are infinitely precious and especially American—a love of freedom . . . self reliance . . . independence .

. . and . . . cooperation” (cited in Doss, 2011, p. 11). The analysis section of this thesis has already identified these characteristics as elements of “The Lonely Men of Short

Creek” story.
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Most nations have stories that embody their valued characteristics. An emphasis on American freedom, independence, and cooperation finds its roots in the history of the

United States. This tells of colonists working together to survive harsh winters in the new world; fiercely independent settlers venturing into the unknown to build the new nation; and the War of Independence against Great Britain that freed former colonists from monarchic rule and allowed them to establish a new country under an independent, elected government. As Richard Hughes (2003), Professor of Religious studies, observed, mythoi, or stories (not necessarily fictional) are integral parts of a nation’s identity that help to make sense of the lives of its people and to create cohesion between them.

In his book, Myths America lives by, Hughes (2003) identified several epic stories that have become a fundamental part of American beliefs and values. These are

“Innocent Nation,” “Christian nation,” “Chosen People,” “Nature’s Nation,” and

“Millennial Nation” (pp. 6-7). Hughes (2003) suggested:

Each of these myths functions at an unconscious level for most Americans . . . [They] are essentially invisible and must remain invisible unless we name them, bring them to consciousness, and explore the way they have functioned—and continue to function—in American culture. (p. 8)

Like McGee’s (1990) ideographs, because of their existence in the subconscious, the values and beliefs embodied within these stories become “naturalized” as major unchallenged presuppositions. Most of the myths identified by Hughes (2003) embody religious faith, and the essential goodness of the United States in a divinely appointed position as the upholder of virtue and freedom in the world. Invoking such values and national ideologies incorporated in “freedom,” “independence,” or “cooperation” might therefore exert powerful effects on audiences, together with a failure to question any jarring aspects in these sweeping narratives when transposed into specific circumstances.
&)

In this way, notions of adult personal and religious freedom might have been unquestioned in their Short Creek context, overshadowing any practices dissonant with national ideologies, and bypassing rational interrogation.

Ideas of personal freedom in 1953 would have achieved synchronous intensification in an era in which Luce’s idea of an “American Century” was inextricably interwoven with the Korean War, the Cold War, and United States perception of itself as a defender of freedom at home and abroad. On July 27, 1953, reports of the Short Creek operation shared the front page with headlines that declared “Korea Truce Signed,” and a story anticipating the homecoming of prisoners of war. Also on the front page, President of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, described world freedom kept alive through the courage of American soldiers (“Ike Says,” 1953). The United States was a nation chosen by God with a “special mission in the world” (Hughes, 2003, p. 19).

Hughes (2003) has discussed what he called the myth of “chosen nation” as originating in colonial times within Puritanism, and where “chosenness meant ‘chosen for the good of the neighbor’” (p. 6.) He suggested that in time, this concept became absolutized to the belief that America had merited special favor with God. Hughes (2003) proposed “many still believe today that, in some mysterious way, God chose the

American people for a special, redemptive role on the stage of world history” (p. 6). In a postwar era, this sense of being chosen, or of having a special mission to the world, might be seen in the idea of the United States as the lamp bearer of freedom’s global light.

In the minds of the American people in 1953, “chosen nation” may also have been associated with the idea of “innocent nation” (Hughes, 2003, p. 8). This was exemplified in the United States’ stand against what were seen as the evils of Hitler’s fascism, and
&* most recently those of communism. The binary created during this Cold War era was, therefore, United States freedom and blamelessness confronting communist enslavement and culpability. In 1950, in keeping with a view of a global American mission,

Eisenhower had initiated a national “Crusade for Freedom,” commencing a 15-year campaign with the stated intention of enlisting the support of US citizens to get the

“truth” to people living behind the “iron curtain” via radio broadcasts (Medhurst, 1997, pp. 646-648). In an address to the nation, Eisenhower described the campaign as something to which all Americans should subscribe—a “roll call of all Americans who love freedom and are ready to do something about it. It is a great patriotic movement . . .”

(cited in Medhurst, 1997, p. 652). This added to a heightened sense of freedom as quintessentially American in nature, and the notion that supporting it was a patriotic duty for every good American. It is noteworthy that Weaver (1953) coined his “god terms” and “devil terms” in this same year, and no coincidence that his prime “devil term” was

“communist.” In this post-World War II and post-Korean War context, its opposite and balancing “god term” appeared to be “American.” Although not used directly by Life, in context, a term like “un-American” (“Tucson Democrats,” 1953) if applied to any action or person would be tantamount to equating it, or them, with the perceived evils of communism. In Life’s binary where Short Creek was decidedly full of American values, perhaps Pyle being “un-American” was merely implied.

In the story’s synchronous context within the Cold War era, McCarthyism was agitating the nation. As an often-unpopular figure, Joseph McCarthy became the antithesis of American freedom and evoked images of police states for many. The US

President’s brother, Arthur Eisenhower (1953), denounced the senator as “the most
'! dangerous menace to American Society,” comparing him to Hitler, and describing his actions as being a “throwback to the Spanish Inquisition” (“Ike’s Brother”). It might have been one matter to oppose communism in other lands or to resist it through the American way of life, but it was perhaps another matter to question the patriotism of Americans at home. A dislike of McCarthy might very well translate into a dislike of anyone perceived as a threat to personal, and particularly religious, freedoms, thus hinting at totalitarianism.

This easily fed into the hero and villain narrative—perhaps contributing to Life’s binary of freedom versus oppression—David versus Goliath—with Pyle as the giant and Short

Creek as the spunky little David who might be any man in America. Heads of American families challenging “technicalities” of the law on constitutional grounds, and bravely facing down the power of overbearing and manipulative authority might be seen as heroic.

Within this framework, it was too easy to see Pyle as an oppressor, particularly since Life omitted his fervent plea for the children’s freedom in its text. As a culmination to his radio address, he had delivered what one must assume he saw to be one the most persuasive of his arguments:

THESE CHILDREN have the rights of all native-born Americans—the rights that were written into the Declaration of Independence. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—and has so often been emphasized since, happiness of their own choosing. The state of Arizona is determined to insure that they have those rights for the remainder of their lives. We could do no less than this. (Pyle, 1953)

Pyle, like the men of Short Creek, drew upon US history and its Bill of Rights to support his plea for what he saw as inherent entitlements of US citizens, albeit children, but Life’s editorial selection appeared weighted in favor of the Short Creek perspective that saw

Pyle as curtailing the adults’ freedoms.
'"

The American Family, a Bulwark of Democracy

Adding to this this narrative of freedom in Life’s photo journal article was possibly the most persuasive national ideology of all—that of the supremacy of the

American family, with fathers as protectors and heads, and mothers supporting them through their labors at home with their children. Family was something to which all readers would have been able to relate as children or as parents. Machin and Mayr (2012) identified “family” and “home” as having connotations of being “sacred” and as

“something cherished in society” (p. 32)—a “god term” (Weaver, 1953). And perhaps family was even more cherished in the context of promoting postwar peace as fathers returned from the Korean War after fighting not only for abstract notions of world freedom from communism, but also for what they might have seen as the defense of their own families.

Family in the 1950s became central to combating foreign ideologies in a Cold

War mindset that pitted communism against “ideal” American family life (People & events, 2013, par. 1). The US represented Soviet women in what it believed to be a repressive system, where they had to leave their children in daycare facilities while they worked in factories. American women in America’s land of democracy had the implied freedom to stay home with their families “tending to hearth and home as they enjoyed the fruits of capitalism,” while those mothers who chose to work were regarded unfavorably

(People & events, 2013, par. 2). As for the “fruits of capitalism” that the stay-at-home mothers in these idealized families enjoyed—they were many.

On September 14, 1953, Life contained 151 advertisements within a total of 212 pages plus the inside and back covers. Much of the advertising was in color, with the
'# majority occupying almost one half of the page on which they appeared. Many were single-page or even double-page spreads, and families frequently appeared in them. One representative example is a double-page advertisement for a Kelvinator clothes dryer that shows a mother and daughter at home dealing with laundry.

Other advertisements in Life show American women with several children.

Typically, in the 1950s, American mothers had three to four children (People & events,

2013, par. 5) and occasionally even more. A full-page advertisement in Life for bed sheets shows a woman in another domestic scene, this time making up a twin bed (again with the aid of an older daughter), while the husband lounges in the other twin bed in the room and six other children play or read. The caption proclaims, “We mothers of big families know how space saving Pacific Contours really are!” (p. 161). Therefore, a family as large as the one portrayed on the last two pages of Life’s story (a group of 12) may not have seemed entirely unusual, although Jessop’s massive family group of descendants might have been more so.

Other portrayals of model American (often family) life appear in the many other advertisements in the magazine. “America works and plays together in Lee” shows a

“steel foreman and his family” wearing Lee work wear, demonstrating the suitability of

“America’s most modern work clothes, ”—an advertisement that includes a family portrait of a husband and wife with their four children (p. 197). In bleak contrast to these well-clad and well-fed families is the “Russian rifleman” (pp. 190-206). This is the story of ill equipped and poorly dressed soviet soldiers, personified by an imaginary individual named “Boris” (p. 190). Boris was a soldier whose poorly designed uniform and boots chafed, who envied “leather boots from America,” whose limited diet bore no
'$ relationship to the abundance enjoyed by Americans, and whose poverty left him without the essentials of life (p. 195). Not only were his physical conditions lamentable, the army in which he served treated its officers very differently from men in the ranks (with the implication that this was not the case in the US army). In spite of their privileges, these officers nevertheless lived in perpetual fear of banishment to places such as Siberia because of some personal deficiency. According to Life’s article, fear of authority and the experience of “the force that was oppressing them” were so great for all the Soviet Army that the result was self-harm and suicides covered up as “accident[s]” (p. 200). This was noteworthy enough to mention, while the suicide threat of the girl in the Short Creek story was evidently not.

In the Soviet Army, superior officers doled out propaganda in which the people of the United States were described as “capitalist pigs” (p. 196) and American soldiers were

“cowardly rapists” (p. 202). The writer of the story, however, warns that in spite of the soviet army’s deficiencies, the Russian soldier is “still a dangerous foe” whom “our own country’s soldiers may some day have to face” (p. 190). Such reminders fueled the Cold

War for years to come, and created another kind of propaganda that made the ideal

American family with religious faith enjoying American freedoms and prosperity a vanguard and custodian of all that was good. In this milieu, foregrounding actual

“rapists” might have been an unpatriotic act, detrimental to the morale of a recovering nation nevertheless involved in its own continuing propaganda war, maintaining its position as the “innocent nation” spoken of by Hughes (2003).

In opposition to the deprivations of communism, all the wonders of American capitalistic life are displayed in Life’s many pages of advertising for cars, furniture,
'% children’s toys, foods, cigarettes, electric razors, televisions, cleaning products and equipment, medical items, Coke, clothing, clock radios, cosmetics, watches and other delights in September, 1953. These were the glittering prizes that the United States could offer its people and that represented the American way of life with its prosperity and stability in the postwar era, particularly for the families that appeared in the pages of Life and who represented families nationwide. Granted that the Short Creek families were not typical in some senses, Life nevertheless showed and promoted the aspects of their lives that conformed to this American ideal. If they did not have all the accoutrements of modern life, it was because they were old-time traditionalists working in a farm community, upholding the traditions of a past time. Life failed to disclose, as The

Arizona Republic had, that conditions in the town suggested abject poverty, rather than idyllic rural life (Nuckolls, 1953). Short Creek was composed of large families; the women dutifully remained at home with their children, supporting their men and working together to create what was shown as a superficially strong home life—at least if the state did not interfere. Where the state had intervened, the separation of Short Creek fathers from their children may have seemed more poignant, particularly when Life’s journalistic narrative obscured the darker causes for the separation. Within a pervasive ideology of

American family as counterpoint to communist life, and within Luce’s own vision of

American preeminence, the Short Creek “family” was portrayed accordingly. In a climate in which an optimistic view was key to patriotic American aims, Life may have preferred not to remind its readers of unpleasant facts like extreme poverty or alleged child sexual abuse.
'&

Life’s theme of strong American families was prominent throughout the magazine, which would have reached many readers in the nation. As well as being a respected icon of US publishing, the United States also knew Life as “America’s ‘favorite magazine,’” with a reach of about forty million people through subscribers who passed it along to others to read (Doss, 2011, p. 3). Some of those readers were likely to have been children leafing through the unusual abundance of pictures in an era when most publications included few images. A single page article at the end of the September 14 issue, titled “How I feel about Life,” gives a sense of at least one reader’s perception of the impact of the photographs, and how the magazine was seen in 1953 as suitable for families. A Dr. J Roscoe Miller, President of Northwestern University, gave his opinion that “you cannot say some things nearly as well as you can show them” (p. 207). Miller also disclosed that Life was “read by everyone in the family,” and had influenced his son

“to take up amateur photography” (p. 207). At that stage in its publishing history, Life might have been aware of its family appeal, and adjusted accordingly.

Part of the family-friendly appeal may been the magazine’s postwar optimism, a trait Doss (2011) had identified as a characteristic of the magazine and one of Luce’s valued traits. Dr. Miller, who was also a heart specialist, disclosed that he was concerned that medical articles not be “frightening or upsetting” for his patients, but was reassured by Life’s reporting as not only “factual” but also “optimistic” (p. 207). In his mind, Life was an upbeat family publication. The magazine had somehow contrived to fit the Short

Creek story into this genre of “optimism” and made it generally suitable for family consumption through images and titles that posed no distressing questions about statutory rape. This was especially true if those looking through Life failed to read the entire story
'' as has been suggested that many did (Baughman, 2011). Readers may have only flicked through the images, and perhaps read only the main titles, received the story in reduced terms as follows: THE LONELY MEN OF SHORT CREEK; THEY AWAIT TRIAL

AS A RESULT OF POLYGAMY UPROAR; LEGAL QUESTIONS, AN ELDER’S

GRAVE, AN EMPTY SCHOOLHOUSE; PRAYER AND THE CORN SEASON.

Nowhere in these headings, or in the accompanying images, is any hint of statutory rape or any other alleged crimes. This is a story of polygamy (contested), the tragedy of

“lonely men” in a “lonely town” in a “lonely situation,” with no children in the schoolhouse, grieving for an old man who has passed away after the state’s action, and a juxtaposition of religion with the traditional farm harvest. In this magazine, rapist is a baseless fabrication of communist propaganda directed against American soldiers, not a potential nomination for the American fathers and apparently decent citizens at Short

Creek.

Certainly, the optimism that Americans were innately good, as in Hughes (2003)

“innocent nation,” shows throughout this issue of Life. This is a celebration of freedom, bravery, and cooperation at all levels of a distinctly American society. This edition includes a salute to freedom and heroism for returning prisoner of war, General William

Dean. There is a heart-warming tale of American people from all backgrounds working together in the face of a natural disaster—“thousands of white collar workers, businessman, [and] farmers” who joined skilled workmen volunteering, “in a miracle of brotherliness,” to rebuild after tornado damage (Life, p. 56). Children could be heroes too, as well as industrious, as in the story of a 13-year-old boy who took over a grocery business when his employer was in hospital (perhaps also an indication that child labor
'( laws were loosely applied in the postwar period). Also included is a family-friendly four- page article on “Sam,” a basset hound (Life, p. 85). “Friend and maker of US

Presidents,” an article about Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (Life, p. 174), is followed by a happy family portrait of Lodge’s grandson, with wife, children, and grandchildren. The only exception to the upbeat approach in stories dealing with US citizens and families was one story of an eccentric couple who built a replica of a warship in their back yard only to have it vandalized when it fell into disrepair. Perhaps its consistency lies in pointing out that US citizens had the freedom to be as independent and as quirky as they wished.

However, all other stories relating to life in the United States were positive. Together with a feature on baseball star Casey Stengel, pictured on the cover, this was generally a celebration of American apple-pie-life into which the story of Short Creek needed to fit somehow. Considered together with Luce’s personal and editorial perspective, these aspects of United States society in 1953 may help to explain Life’s sentimental portrayal of hard working, rural, and ruggedly independent American family life, and its lack of elaboration of darker themes, but not excuse its lack of presenting a case for alleged victims concealed by its reporting.

Religion, a Manifestation of American Tradition

American family life, optimism, cooperation, and a general goodness were not the only values that Life promoted in its Short Creek story. As appeared in the analysis, the magazine prominently featured religion in a way to likely to engender sympathy.

America as a haven for religious freedom is an enduring narrative of Pilgrim Fathers and others like them who fled persecution and expectations of religious conformity in Europe.
')

The religious liberties of a new world ultimately became enshrined in the First

Amendment of the Constitution of the United States—“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” (First

Amendment, 2013). Thus, religious freedom and independence became an integral part of the American psyche—so much so perhaps, that to merely invoke such national ideologies might have been to halt all debate. This may have made it difficult for readers to see potential challenges to Short Creek’s assumptions about what the “Free Exercise” clause meant, particularly when most of the state’s arguments were absent from the pages of Life. This sidestepped questions about what might be valid limitations on Free

Exercise of religion where it impinged on US law or the rights of others. Life’s images and texts instead told a story of religious “rights,” challenges to the US constitution, and what appeared to be a religion under siege. This only highlights the gaps in the narrative about children co-opted in the service of this religious “freedom.”

Like “family,” religion was important to Life’s editor, Luce, and like family, religion was also enlisted in the war against communism. Luce was the son of

Presbyterian missionaries and a believer in Christian Protestantism (Morgan, 2011).

However, Morgan (2011) suggested that Life associated all religion, including

Catholicism and non-Christian faiths, as essentially “conservative . . . as guardian of democracy . . . and as pure expression of national heritage” (p. 140). Even non-Christian religions were a safeguard against totalitarianism, embodying “tenacious spiritual resistance” to world systems antithetical to American values (Morgan, 2011, p. 143).

Religion was therefore a manifestation of American tradition integral to maintaining democracy in the world. What might have been seen as discordant to American tradition,
'* or even as a cult, might also have been regarded and shaped by Luce into a “tenacious spiritual resistance “ that supported an American tradition of religion reinforcing

American values of faith and belief that by their existence strengthened American life and challenged “atheistic” communism.

Religion was not only associated with the ideological battles of postwar America in 1953, but it was also a connection with the past. According to Morgan (2011), in the pages of Life, “religion was . . . consistently associated with the old and the traditional,” or “properly associated with the past” (p. 140). These were positive traits for Luce. The fact that Short Creekers were not dressed in the contemporary fashions promoted by

Life’s advertising sponsors, nor pictured using the modern conveniences offered by

American capitalism, may have only added to their religious cachet as members of an

“old time religion.” Their images may have evoked a pioneer past when people worked together living off the land in rugged conditions and still adhered to their faith, rather than a separatist sect rejecting mainstream America.

If not for Life’s careful framing of this story, it might have been a stretch for some readers to view polygamists as representing any kind of American traditionalism, except perhaps in the sense of American innovation in founding a religion of its own. The beginnings of Mormonism, from which Short Creek’s religious beliefs stemmed, were in the Eastern United States in 1820 and resulted from a claimed vision of God by its founder, Joseph Smith (“Joseph Smith,” 2013). For some readers, especially those in

Utah or Arizona where Mormon populations were high, some of the themes of Life’s story related to their own traditions.
(!

In synchronous terms, the timing of the Short Creek operation coincided with an important state holiday in Utah and Arizona that had religious overtones. Pioneer Day on

July 24 (just 2 days before the Short Creek action) was a significant celebration for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and for members of the Short

Creek community. In Mesa, Arizona, crowds turned out to watch a parade in which

Governor Pyle rode in one of the 50 floats (“Mormons Celebrate,” 1953). Pioneer Day that year celebrated the 106th anniversary of the Mormons’ entrance into the Salt Lake

Valley led by their revered (polygamist) leader, President Brigham Young (“Mormons

Celebrate,” 1953). These esteemed pioneers, some of whom were themselves polygamists, settled parts of the Western United States, particularly Utah and Arizona, and were the ancestors of many in those regions.

The LDS church had undergone its own battles with the law over its practice of polygamy that had started in secret as early as 1832 and had only gradually become publicly known (Compton, 2001). The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus

Christ of Latter-day Saints is a book accepted by its membership as the revelations of

God to his people via his prophets (in particular Smith, the founder of Mormonism). It includes instruction on what was once believed to be the necessity of polygamy as a rite of passage towards heaven and ultimate godhood. The Doctrine and Covenants details the polygamy of biblical patriarchs, Moses, Abraham, Jacob and, their blamelessness in doing what God, according to Mormon scripture, commanded them to (132:29-39), with their subsequent reward: “they have entered into their exaltation according to the promises, and sit upon thrones, and are not angels but are gods” (132:37). LDS members
(" in the 1800s were taught that they could achieve the same reward by complying with the same commands from God (i.e., polygamy).

There were not only glorious promises attached to the living of divinely sanctioned polygamy, there were also severe penalties attached to its rejection. There was a general threat of damnation; “then are ye damned; for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory” (Doctrine and Covenants, 132:4). However, women were especially singled out for noncompliance with this dictum, with the threat of

God’s destruction.

And again, verily, verily, I say unto you, if any man have a wife, who holds the keys of this power, and he teaches unto her the law of my priesthood, as pertaining to these things, then shall she believe and administer unto him, or she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord your God; for I will destroy her; for I will magnify my name upon all those who receive and abide in my law. (Doctrine and Covenants, 132: 64)

For faithful members of the LDS church in its early days, polygamy was a high stakes law from the heavens, leading to either heavenly glories or damnation and destruction.

Following Smith’s presidency, many of the early LDS Presidents and church authorities took these teachings at face value. President Young, for instance, asserted,

“The only men who become Gods, even the sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy" (Journal of Discourses,12 11:269). Adhering to what the LDS believed to be the law of God led to inevitable conflicts with US law. Polygamy was illegal in Illinois13

12 Lds.org, which hosts the online version of this publication, carries this caveat: “The Journal of Discourses is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is a compilation of sermons and other materials from the early years of the Church, which were transcribed and then published. It included some doctrinal instruction but also practical teaching, some of which is speculative in nature and some of which is only of historical interest.” 13 "Bigamy consists in the having of two wives or two husbands at one and the same time, knowing that the former husband or wife is still alive. If any person or persons
(# when Smith first instituted the practice there, and according to US law, “there had never been a time in any State of the Union when polygamy has not been an offence against society, cognizable by the civil courts and punishable with more or less severity”

(Reynolds, 1878). Not deterred by illegality, the LDS Church authorities found scriptural justification for breaking United States law to keep that of God. The key to the matter was whether a law was “constitutional.” If it was perceived to be unconstitutional it was

“of man,” was “evil,” and was therefore not binding on the church membership to obey

(Doctrine and Covenants, 98:4-8). This explains such statements as President Young’s in

1852:

If I had forty wives in the United States, they did not know it, and could not substantiate it, neither did I ask any lawyer, judge, or magistrate for them. I live above the law, and so do this people [emphasis added]. (Journal of Discourses, 1:361)

This also explains Short Creek’s later appeals to the US Constitution over its religious

“rights.”

The LDS church may have believed that its establishment of the territory of

Deseret in the far west of the nation might have allowed it to establish its own laws independent of the US. However, polygamy had proved a significant hindrance to the political aims of the territory in its bid for statehood, and had resulted in prison sentences

within this State, being married, or who shall hereafter marry, do at any time marry any person or persons, the former husband or wife being alive, the person so offending shall, on conviction thereof, be punished by a fine, not exceeding one thousand dollars, and imprisoned in the penitentiary, not exceeding two years. It shall not be necessary to prove either of the said marriages by the register or certificate thereof, or other record evidence; but the same may be proved by such evidence as is admissible to prove a marriage in other cases, and when such second marriage shall have taken place without this state, cohabitation in this state after such second marriage shall be deemed the commission of the crime of bigamy, and the trial in such case may take place in the county where such cohabitation shall have occurred." (Revised laws of Illinois), 1833, section 121, pp.198- 99
($ for some of its membership, including those in its hierarchy (Driggs, 1990, par. 17). It was during this period, in 1890, that Mormon President Wilford Woodruff issued a

“Manifesto” officially banning polygamy or “plural marriage” as it became known, although the practice had lingered on into the early part of the next century (Driggs,

1999, pars. 12-24). The first seven presidents of the LDS church had been practicing polygamists, but a new regime began in 1918 when Heber J. Grant came to the presidency as a technical monogamist after two of the three women he claimed as concurrent wives had passed away (Driggs, 1990).

As writers such as Driggs (1990) have noted, scriptural and early prophetic authority ensured that polygamy continued after the mainstream LDS church officially gave it up. This was usually on the part of members who saw the church’s action as resulting from political expediency, rather than divine revelation. It was renegade operations like Short Creek’s, often composed of at least some excommunicated members of the Mormon Church, who clung tenaciously to the practice. In context, it is not difficult to see how living above the law might become a justification of their practices. The problem this presented was that anything might be potentially justified if it assisted them, as God’s chosen people, to obey God’s will—even if that meant taking underage girls in polygamous unions.

The post-Manifesto LDS Church stressed obedience to all United States laws, citing other prophetic justification in The Articles of Faith, a list of core beliefs of the church; “We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law” (1:12). Nevertheless, although the LDS hierarchy ultimately enforced a strict ban on polygamy and excommunicated all members
(% who defied it, the LDS Church retained polygamy as at least a theoretical tenet of its faith. Section 132 remains part of the Doctrine and Covenants used by the LDS church today, and widowers may be eternally married to another spouse after their wife’s death, which presupposes multiple wives in the hereafter. LDS apostle and later church president, Joseph Fielding Smith (1956), for example, participated in two other LDS temple marriages and affirmed “my wives will be mine in eternity” (Doctrines of

Salvation, 2, p. 67).

Back in 1953, for those Mormons reading Life’s story, it was only 35 years since the last LDS President to have lived polygamy took his place at the head of the church.

Considering this, it is likely that at least some of the grandparents or great grandparents of a number of these readers were those jailed for what was earlier considered faithful adherence to God’s laws, perhaps making it difficult to be too condemnatory of polygamy and its practitioners.

Life’s constant verbal and visual references to Mormonism might have created conflict in the minds of LDS readers, whether as members of the public or as policy makers in the Utah-Arizona region. It might be uncomfortable to condemn the Short

Creekers for their polygamy, which was the transgression accentuated in Life, since that might also have implicitly condemned not only their own grandparents, but also multiple past Presidents and hierarchy of the LDS church. Those who did not see Short Creek as an embarrassing fringe cult tarnishing the name “Mormon,” might instead have viewed the lawbreakers with perhaps at least a tinge of solidarity.

The foregoing sections have pointed to the many complex layers of history, and national and regional ideologies that may have influenced how Life’ editorial staff framed
(&

“The Lonely Men of Short Creek” story. This analysis has also suggested ways in which various members of American society might have viewed the story in the period after

World War II, the Korean War, and during the throes of the continuing Cold War.

Religion and family took on specific meanings and purposes during this era that constructed them as tools in the fight against communism. The following and final chapter summarizes the findings of this analysis, and considers the implications of these constructions of family and religion in 1953 and the years following, particularly for the children of Short Creek, and generally for children in religious groups. It again questions the prevailing narrative of a persecuted people but harmless people, by examining what is now known about child victims in that community, and how the frame established by Life and sometimes replicated by various authors, together with persistent national ideologies connected to religion and family, may continue to deflect attention from criminal acts within religious communities. It also considers the implications of past and present attitudes to children’s rights in the United States and asks what responsibility public and policy makers bear when considering media representations of child victims.

('

CHAPTER 5

COMPETING FRAMES AND THEIR IDEOLOGICAL

IMPLICATIONS, PAST AND PRESENT

Life’s edited version of events at Short Creek, its backgrounding and foregrounding choices, its omissions, and sometimes its distortions, painted a mostly sanitized view of the town and its activities. This corresponded with Luce’s personal vision of idealized American family life, especially within a religious setting. This view emphasized all that was seen as positive about the United States; its traditions, freedom, preeminence in the world, and inherent goodness. Luce’s worldview in many ways was not unique. It reflected the values and influences of its time, enlisting religion and family in the patriotic Cold War thrust to maintain American liberty in the face of the “Red” threat. Any kind of religious belief was a bulwark of democracy against what the US believed was the menace of godless communism. In the United States, the government was ideally a benign benefactor that did not meddle in the “personal” affairs of family or of religious practice. By inference, only totalitarian regimes and oppressive dictatorships interfered in these issues.

Optimism was also an important ingredient in these postwar years. This was a nation recovering from the losses of World War II and attempting to return to normal
(( after the war in Korea. One might say that optimism became a manifestation of patriotism. America was inherently good. Unlike the Soviet Union or Hitler’s Germany,

US government allowed its people freedoms. Its soldiers were heroic, its citizens industrious and cooperative. They maintained religious faith, promoted family and freedom, and enjoyed the tangible benefits of capitalism. This was a nation that craved peace, celebrated those who had defended the freedoms of the country and of the world, and wanted to see its citizens as generally upright people—what Hughes (2003) might have described as an “innocent nation” or “a good and compassionate nation” (p. 1).

This may have been a superficially attractive view, but the images that Life selected for its Short Creek story to harmonize with Luce’s and the nation’s world view in 1953 were a one-sided interpretation of a serious issue. Positive and appealing images of undisrupted cooperative and religious family life with smiling mothers alongside the father of their children provided a counterpoint to the deliberately tragic images and captions representing those individuals affected by the State of Arizona’s action. The message was far from subtle, and it was evident that Pyle was the nominated villain of the tale, with the implication of extreme and unjustified proceedings based on shaky or nonexistent evidence, even of religious persecution and a state overstepping its jurisdiction over families. This situated the Short Creek families, and in particular the men, as victims, while failing to consider the victims that the adults might have been creating through their religious practices.

There were significant silences in Life’s Short Creek narrative that might have affected public perceptions of the story. These included Pyle’s foregrounding of alleged child victims in his statement that the operation was about abused children, his pleas on
() their behalf that referred to their right to freedom as US citizens, and his claims of their slavery in a system in which parents gave up female children to support the practice of polygamy. Life, on the other hand, backgrounded these alleged child victims to the point of virtual invisibility. The complete story of the 17-year-old girl was not included, and vital details were left out that would have revealed the extent of her ordeal in being forced into an illegal underage union with a man at least 28 years her senior (or even more depending on her age when this took place). Life also omitted the full list of the state’s charges, which facilitated the periodical’s subtle and not so subtle assertions that the state’s action was more about polygamy than anything else, which was framed in the context of simply a manifestation of traditional pioneering ways that might be overlooked as harmless. If taxpayers had known the details of the state’s complete list of charges against the people of Short Creek, they might have been concerned about tax evasion, corporate law infringements, misuse of school funds, and tampering with public records, let alone “contributing to the delinquency of minors.” Any regular member of the public would have expected to face legal action over any of these charges, and a sympathetic rendering of a community as victims of implied religious persecution does not alter the fact that there were multiple charges to be accounted for. Also omitted were any references to the town’s severe poverty, which if included might have led to questions about the sustainability of its life style (particularly when linked with the charges of tax evasion), and would certainly have disrupted Life’s appealing scenes of rural life.

One might reasonably argue that some omissions are inevitable in telling a story in the press. Since it is impossible to include every detail, selection is an integral part of any editorial process. However, arguing that there was simply insufficient space in the
(* magazine for a more complete story does not justify the sometimes myopic and truncated version of events that appeared in print—particularly when the Short Creek story is contrasted with others that appeared. “The Russian Rifleman,” for example, was afforded ample space, and covered eight half-pages of text plus another two full double pages with few illustrations. This story was replete with an abundance of detail that painted a dismal picture of Soviet Army life, and an overview of the oppressions of communism. In view of this and other extensive articles in the magazine, it appears that space was available for some accounts. From the findings of this study, it appears that

Life based its apparent selectivity on a predetermined and partisan approach encouraged by its editor.

Beyond the omissions, some insinuations amounted to misleading reporting.

Implying that the state was responsible for the death of an 84-year-old man was debatable and raises the question of whether Life was suggesting that age should have provided some kind of immunity from criminal charges. The periodical also implied that the state possibly made arrests first and gathered evidence later, in spite of Pyle’s statement that over a period of 2 years plus, ample evidence had been gathered for multiple crimes beyond polygamy, giving the state a firm foundation from which to issue warrants and to make arrests. Furthermore, Life also suggested that the charges beyond polygamy were concocted by the state in the absence of an inability to prove the crime of polygamy itself. This indicated the magazine’s disregard or disbelief of Pyle’s detailed explanations of the state of Arizona’s investigation, which he laid out in a radio speech readily available to news agencies. One might expect the press to express skepticism on
)! occasion, but the skepticism Life directed against Pyle appeared to be largely suspended in the case of Short Creek and its activities.

Life’s framing of “The Lonely Men of Short Creek” story raises some important questions about ethical considerations in producing news stories involving alleged victims. Certainly, this study does not suggest that the periodical had a responsibility to demonize the Short Creek community. As Cook (2008) observed, “the story portrayed the men and their families as human beings” (par. 16), which is hardly a negative journalistic trait. However, Cook’s other claim that Life avoided stereotyping (2008, par. 16) appears questionable as we view images of a tightly knit religious farming community whose families worked together preparing food and relaxed by singing around the family organ.

Life blatantly contrasted this idyllic picture with that of family life disturbed by the state’s action. For some stories, lack of balanced reporting might not have huge import.

However, in an article with such high stakes for the alleged child victims, Life’s biased reporting appears unethical, damaging, and to have undercut what Pyle (1953) claimed to be “one of every state’s deepest obligations—to protect and defend the helpless” (par. 7).

It appeared that in 1953 and in the following years, the helpless children of Short Creek had no protection. Some may argue that Pyle’s focus was in fact adult polygamy and that he may have accentuated the plight of children for his own reasons. Whatever one’s opinion, one must also acknowledge that for Life to virtually ignore alleged victims has serious implications.

)"

Victims and Perpetrators

What is most disquieting about Life’s one-sided account of evidently decent and religious farming families threatened by an oppressive state, is that this was a narrative distracting from the reality that victims or perpetrators look no different from any other members of society. Life simply failed to interrogate a religious culture in which child

“wives” might be a reality, and in which even schoolteachers, farmers, university graduates, patriarchs, community leaders, the aged, war veterans, martyrs, or religionists could be guilty of criminal behavior. The periodical failed to clarify that a 17-year-old girl was not an adult woman, or that the “marriage” into which she and possibly others were being inducted (willingly or not) was not a marriage at all, but a serious criminal offense in which purported “husbands” were actually assailants. Where Pyle spoke of severe crimes towards children, Life instead published sentimental pictures of abandoned puppies, religious “martyrs” and family life tragically interrupted by an apparently oppressive state. The magazine’s version of events seemed determined to diminish or ignore what might be dissonant to its telling of a story painted in generally favorable terms.

Perhaps Life’s most objectionable reporting was found in its victim story, which contained significant silences and absences. This was its account of a girl who, according to the magazine and the Short Creek men, was apparently not a victim. The magazine’s abbreviated version disallowed a child’s voice, and therefore avoided confronting the full import of her words that conveyed despair, thoughts of suicide, and a powerlessness to avoid an enforced polygamous union with a much older man. Apparently, no one
)# intervened on her behalf—not even her parents whom most people might agree had a responsibility to protect her.

While Life failed to adequately represent this alleged victim’s testimony, recorded evidence supports the view that this casualty of Short Creek’s religious ideology was not the only one. Child victims existed in the town, however uncomfortable that may have been to acknowledge. While some may want to argue, as Life subtly did, that adult polygamy was really Pyle’s underlying target, when examining the evidence available today, there is certainly less reason to question his rationale as one of rescuing children from sexual abuse within a polygamist community.

Other writers, as Life did, have appeared to either doubt that these girls were truly victims, or to suggest that they were some kind of anomaly. In this way, a narrative appeared that in some ways paralleled that of Life. Bradley (1996) “definitive” account of the Short Creek story included information that supported Pyle’s charges of statutory rape, but came to very different conclusions about the community. For instance, she stated, “the average age at first marriage for fundamentalist women in Short Creek was sixteen years old, although fourteen and fifteen were not uncommon ages at which girls were married” (Bradley, 1996, p. 99). Bradley (1996) supported this some statistics that revealing that “at the time of the raid there were at least a dozen girls between fourteen and seventeen years of age who were either pregnant or were the mothers of up to three children” (p. 100). Furthermore, she included data showing that in 1953, there were not only 16 women under the age of 18 whom she described as “married,” but that there were an additional 32 adult women for whom the birth of their first child took place when they were under the age of 18 (p. 206). Bradley (1996) observed, “approximately two-thirds of
)$ this group [of Short Creek women] were married by the time they were sixteen” (p. 100).

Although some of these women may have lived on the Utah side of town and were therefore not subject to Arizona laws, this number equates to more than a few victims of statutory rape, and makes talk of whether these unions were “forced,” a moot point.

Bradley went on to suggest that by the 1990s the average age for “marriage” in Short

Creek was 19. She reiterated this average when interviewed again about Short Creek in the context of the Texas action against the FLDS in 2008, again downplaying Short

Creek’s underage unions by asserting that the very young underage unions that occurred in Texas were not representative of Short Creek’s practices (Mikita, 2008). She stated,

"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” (Bradley cited in Mikita, 2008, par. 6). In another interview, she again suggested that in 1953,   
  



 





 
 
 
 
 


 

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Since, as Bradley (1996) has noted, there were no civil records of polygamist unions, one can only assume that these statistics came from the community’s self-reports. If one accepts their accuracy, averages of course do not account for possibly extreme ends of a scale that may have included much older or much younger women.

Furthermore, although Bradley persistently referred to underage or illegal unions as

“marriages,” with the age of consent in Arizona as 18 years of age, some of these were clearly sexual assaults on children. Referencing this as marriage was an inaccurate presupposition that served to mask criminal behavior, as was the word “kidnapped” in reference to the state of Arizona’s actions in reference to the children as already noted

(Davis, 2005). Also troubling is Bradley’s (1996) suggestion of the innocence of two
)% community members, Dan Barlow and Spencer Johnson. Her use of quotation marks around the word “lawbreakers” (p. 140) in reference to them suggested that she doubted that they were, even though she confirmed that Barlow was a polygamist, and that he had what she called “three young wives” (p. 134). One of these “young wives” was 15 years old and pregnant at the time of the Short Creek action (Bradley, 1996). One can only speculate on Bradley’s reasons for this stance. Certainly, she appeared to be contextualizing what happened at Short Creek within a larger narrative of the Church of

Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints own story of persecution from its early history in the days of Illinois and Missouri. Her framing of Short Creek reflected a possible viewpoint that religious belief justifies breaking laws, or perhaps that if the men had been allowed legal status for their polygamy they would not have been charged with statutory rape.

Whatever the various opinions might be about Arizona law, Life’s relaying of

Short Creek’s denial that “women” being forced into polygamous unions, and its inclusion of a 17-year-old in this reference, was unethical and misleading. Life’s framing might have led readers to believe that 17 represented adulthood, which in Arizona it did not. If Bradley’s earlier data about underage marriages was correct, considering that some of the Short Creek women who were adults in 1953 (18 and over) were already mothers or in polygamous unions when legally children, they were incapable of consent however well the community or their parents might have groomed them to accept their position.14

Where there were victims, there were also perpetrators; and as Guiora (2010) pointed out, these were legally culpable for their actions, as any other members of society.

14 Vine (2010) showed how thoroughly children may be conditioned to accept their abusers’ dictates. She reported that a 12-year-old statutory rape victim of 50-year- old Warren Jeffs had testified, “‘Heavenly Father is the one that tells Warren when a girl is ready to get married . . . He is only following the word of Heavenly Father’” (par. 7).
)&

A police witness at the scene on July 26, 1953, who released his account years later, supported the state’s allegation of extremely young, underage mothers. Captain

Ruth (1989) of the Utah Highway Patrol recalled giving food to two hungry 13-year-old

Short Creek girls on the day of the police action. Both were visibly pregnant and were, according to him, “two of the Johnson’s many wives” (Ruth, 1989, par. 1). All of this supports Pyle’s claim that “highly competent investigators have been unable to find a single instance in the last decade for a girl child’s reaching the age of 15 without having been forced into a shameful mockery of marriage” (Pyle, 1953, par. 5). The only point that might have been debated was how well indoctrinated these children were to accept their lot, making the word “forced” possibly inaccurate, but still irrelevant. Although Life may not have known all of the details, it was aware of at least one alleged victim, and also of Pyle’s claims that the state had evidence that that over the previous 10 years the norm in Short Creek was to place girls in polygamous unions by the time they were 15 years old. Under the circumstance, Life’s omissions and obfuscations did nothing to help the plight of these children or others like them.

There were no pregnant 13-year-olds pictured in the pages of Life, or at least there were none visibly so, and if any existed on the Utah side of town they were unlikely to be paraded for photographers. In Mackert’s family portrait, as one of his daughters later noted, the “wives” were “age appropriate”(Walker, 2010, par. 8). This was an image that did not disrupt Short Creek’s denials. Apart from sparse details in the press, most challenges to Short Creek’s official party line came later.15 Readers who looked only at

15 There are numerous articles about daughters of Clyde Mackert making allegations about their father’s sexual abuse of them from early childhood, and of underage unions. See, for example, Dark (2008) and Keller (2008).
)' the commanding images and titles in Life would have found no trace of the statutory rape charges that were so poorly represented or even undermined in the written text.

Determining whose views were represented in the press, and how such views were represented, is key to a study that considers issues of power. As Johnstone (2008) noted, “struggles over power and control are often struggles over who gets to speak and who does not” (p. 70). Few details of Pyle’s (1953) extensive radio address appear in the pages of Life. If they had, they would have revealed his impassioned appeal for the children of Short Creek. He saw his July 1953 operation not as a “raid,” to which it was often later referred (Bradley, 1996), but instead as a rescue of what were essentially child slaves manipulated by a religious ideology in which parents disposed of them as property

(Pyle, 1953). Pyle (1953) had argued for the rights of children as American citizens –the right to liberty and happiness “of their own choosing,” but instead of a liberator of children, Life subtly depicted him as an oppressor and religious persecutor. In Life’s photojournalism in September 1953, the words of the men of the community are clearly privileged over Pyle’s narrative concerning child victims, privileged over adult women’s voices that are entirely absent from the story, and most certainly privileged over the 17- year-old girl whose words were so briefly and inaccurately reported and then so rapidly dismissed. As for the unheard voices of the unseen victims, they had to rely on advocates to speak on their behalf. Since Pyle’s voice was silenced in Life, so were theirs when the magazine failed to take up their cause.

These textual absences and silences are meaningful in swaying readers’ opinions of the issues at stake in Short Creek and their attitudes towards the main characters, which might have been very different of they had been apprised of details about charges
)( and alleged victims. Where Life might have posed some sense of doubt over the apparently wholesome life-style displayed for its cameras and notebooks, it instead preferred to adhere to a generally consistently sympathetic storyline for the men of Short

Creek and their community. Through pleasant or poignant scenes and captioning, Life’s chosen narrative distracted from darker issues—to accentuate American virtue rather than

American vice with a rhetoric that may have contributed to some serious material effects.

Dissonant Ideologies

Life’s attempt to fit Short Creek as a religious community into the grand narrative of ideal American family life in a democratic and free nation at peace is problematic. The magazine’s editorial perspective ignored ways in which the religious group, far from supporting American ideals of freedom and democracy, operated under a very different ideology.

This study has already discussed the religious history that might have contributed to law breaking in the town. Being “above the law,” or any law that was seen as unconstitutional, may have provided the rationale for the community’s adults to do things that they saw as in the best interests of God’s work. This might have accounted for the list of charges leveled against the Short Creek, including those absent from Life’s narrative. Benjamin Bistline (2004), who was a young teenager living in Short Creek in

1953, saw the religious community as essentially administered by a theocratic dictatorship that demanded obedience of its membership. Not only that, he confirmed that the townspeople were guilty of nearly all of the charges laid against them by Pyle. The only charge that Bistline (2004) appeared to have contested was the misuse of school
)) funds in improving the school buildings, although part of the money went towards a vehicle commandeered for the personal use of one man. This left tax evasion, corporate law infractions, misuse of school funds, misuse of school property, tampering with public records, statutory rape, and the rest.

Although the focus of this analysis is not specifically polygamy, it is nevertheless impossible to ignore how that practice may have affected children in a closed community like Short Creek. The sheer practicality presented by an almost equal ratio of men to women in the US population was problematic (Ratio, 2013). If there were no surplus adult women, where were men to find sufficient females to support the institution?

Scholarly studies such as Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson’s (2012) significant comparative investigation of historical polygamy and monogamy point to the almost inevitability of underage sexual relationships in religious polygamous groups in any era. In such communities, there is intense competition for females, and older and more powerful men often take precedence over younger males in establishing multiple unions with women

(Henrich et al., 2012). Add this to apparently religiously sanctioned contravention of select US laws in order to obey superior divine law, the religious community at Short

Creek might have believed underage unions necessary to enable its practice of polygamy.

This creates valid concerns for child welfare. Under the circumstances, Mackert’s claim that his religion was not encroaching on anyone else’s rights might be challenged by the existence of children given up by their mothers and enlisted by the men of the religious community to provide the requisite number of “wives” to secure a glorious hereafter.

Ultimately, for the men of Short Creek charged with an array of crimes, the outcome in 1953 was a plea bargain. In this, they admitted being guilty of a simple
)* misdemeanor—the charge of “unlawful cohabitation”—and as a result, the court allowed them to return home with 12-month suspended sentences conditional on their agreement to discontinue practicing polygamy. The court dropped all other charges—including statutory rape, which, for an adult man in 1953 in the state of Arizona would have carried a sentence of 10 to 20 years (State v Telavera, 1953). The women and children also eventually returned home, and life went back to whatever was “normal” for the community. This included a continuation of polygamy, the state’s nonenforcement of the suspended sentences, and the decades-long inaction toward the community already discussed.

Although it is impossible to categorically link press reports, especially a single story, to the actions or inactions of legislators or state officials, this study has speculated on some potential contributory influences of a media text upon long-term non- intervention in Short Creek after 1953. When the most prominent and influential news magazine in the nation apparently came out on the side of Short Creek, backed up by other negative reporting elsewhere,16 followed by Pyle’s political demise in Arizona, it may have appeared risky for officials who valued their positions to become further involved. It may be that they feared the same fate as Pyle. It might have been especially difficult to take an oppositional stance when taking into account such pervasive suggestions of a generally harmless group of people attempting to live their religion in a small American farming town, especially when individual freedoms and freedom of religion were highly prized as part of an ideology of a patriotic home-based fight against

16 Utah historian, Will Bagley (2001), claimed that “Pyle was regarded as a cheap politician grabbing for headlines at the expense of innocent families . . . virtually every . . . paper in the U.S. ridiculed his ‘assault on evil.’ At the first opportunity, voters gave him the boot. Short Creek finished Pyle's political career” (p. B1).
*! communism. All of these elements may have combined to give Short Creek the reputation of being the “hot potato”17 that no politician wanted to touch.

Short Creek’s Legacy

What are the implications of this research today? Besides demonstrating the complex forces that affect how the press frames stories, or how invocations of specific key terms embedded in US national ideologies may sometimes trigger automatic responses in both the media and the public, a vital consideration is the media’s material effects on past or present victims. The legacy of Short Creek 1953, and whatever part the media played in it, may as Watkiss (2013) suggested, perhaps be seen in the actions of those who inherited the practices of the adults who were generally not made accountable for contravening state laws. Many of the current FLDS grew up in the town of Short

Creek. Jeffs, their leader, is in a Texas prison for sexually assaulting at least one 12-year- old and one 14-year-old girl in the guise of a polygamous “marriage” (Forsyth, 2011, pars. 1- 2), but this has not discouraged his followers. As late as 2010, the community’s description of itself was uncannily similar to Life’s in 1953. In a National Geographic article, members of modern Short Creek claimed that their lives were “idyllic” in a town with “old fashioned devotion and neighborly cooperation” and a “wholesome” environment for children (Anderson, 2010, par. 14). Just how “wholesome” is justifiably questionable, and although it is not suggested that religious freedoms or family rights be discarded, it is perhaps important to debate their justifiable limits.

17 This phrase in relation to Short Creek was coined in a cartoon in The Arizona Republic, which depicted a literal hot potato bearing the name of Short Creek, alongside various politicians who apparently believed that something should be done, but refused personal involvement. See Bradley (1996, p. 126).
*"

A valuable follow-up study to this one might be a close comparison of twenty- first-century reporting about the FLDS sect’s activities to those written in 1953, in order to assess the influence of national values and beliefs of today on continuing potential media bias, or even to analyze FLDS current use of the media to argue its cause. When the state of Texas took its own action against the FLDS in 2008, entering the sect’s

Yearning for Zion Ranch, it was based on a series of phone calls from a girl claiming that she was pregnant and being held captive there (Roberts & Weber, 2011). The state police moved in, expecting to retrieve one girl, but instead found what was described as

“rampant evidence of sexual abuse of girls” (Robert & Weber, 2011, par. 7). Texas

Ranger, Captain Brooks Long, stated, "When you have teenage girls standing in front of you pregnant, that’s what I call evidence” (cited in Roberts & Weber, 2011, par. 8).

Based on its immediate findings at the ranch, Texas removed over 400 children

(accompanied by FLDS women) to temporary state accommodations to make further enquires into their welfare. The media printed and broadcast pictures of an event that closely resembled Arizona 1953, except that the numbers in comparison were much larger. Texas claimed evidence of neglect and abuse of children. However, when the original phone calls turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by a mentally ill woman, the media turned on the state and began to print what Texas Ranger, Long, claimed to be

“miscommunication” and “FLDS propaganda” (cited in Roberts & Weber, 2011, par. 8).

The press began to question Texas’s actions, unaware of a mass of evidence being sifted through by law enforcement that was not revealed until much later. This included an audiotape of Jeffs’ statutory rape of a 12-year-old girl in the sect’s temple, and
*#

“wedding” photographs of Jeffs kissing little girls (King, 2008). Unfortunately, according to Long:

FLDS lawyers won a court order requiring that all documents be first reviewed to ensure the sect's religious rights weren't violated. Investigators could not even begin their review of the all the documentary evidence until about six weeks after the raid — when the child custody ruling was well on its way to being overruled. (cited in Roberts & Weber, 2011, par. 15)

This reveals that the same kinds of arguments from 1953 were being utilized as a defense in 2008, in similar circumstances and with the same religious group. These were parental and religious rights, and the inviolability of the family (Court, 2008).

In the wake of extensive media coverage and criticism of the state of Texas’ actions, and the inability of the state to assemble its evidence rapidly enough, the courts ruled to return the children, suggesting that that if they were at risk it was not an imminent enough threat to keep them apart from their families. Watkiss (2011), frustrated by what he saw as the influence of his own profession in helping to bring about another failure to protect children, wrote an article titled, “Whatever Happens to Warren Jeffs— the Media is Guilty.” In it, he accused the media of not just “sympathetic” reporting, but also what he called “simple-minded coverage” in the face of which “Texas officials caved” and returned all the children in spite of Child Protective Services (CPS) workers’ claims of clear evidence of abuse (Watkiss, 2011, par. 14).

Watkiss’ (2011) claims are not without foundation. CPS workers have expressed concern at a failure to follow up on cases where there was evidence of abuse. One CPS caseworker expressed her views of the power of the media as material in the state dropping child abuse cases related to the FLDS. She complained, “The state was so extremely concerned with the media that they just did not even fight for any additional
*$ cases. They were more concerned about covering their own ass” (cited in Heimlich, 2012, par. 67). She also argued that removing children from parents was correct action in the circumstances because of the responsibility the agency had towards the children. She complained, “that’s what our job is, to protect kids, and they didn’t do that” (cited in

Heimlich, 2012, par. 67).

Similar complaints exist from other CPS workers, upset and frustrated with their failure to protect FLDS children. Heimlich (2012), in the Texas Observer, conducted a 6- month investigation of the state of Texas’s operation and its and reported that CPS:

In the face of public and political pressure, and stung by several critical mistakes—closed nearly all the children’s cases just months after the raid, even though cases involving as many as 30 children contained clear evidence of sexual assault due to underage “spiritual” marriage. The agency didn’t seek to terminate any parent’s custodial rights, over the strenuous objections of its own attorneys. This means even Warren Jeffs, who is serving a life sentence for sexually abusing girls and has been accused of raping boys, retains custody of his hundreds of children. (2012, par. 14)

Yet again, as in 1953, “clear evidence” was not sufficient to win the day, and a lack of will to proceed further has left children the losers then and now.

Heimlich (2012) further indicated that many of the same issues from 1953 became central to a lack of protection for children in the FLDS sect following 2008. In Short

Creek 1953, the 12-month suspended sentences were never enforced due to lack of continuing state oversight of the community, and according to Heimlich (2012), in Texas,

“caseworkers stopped monitoring the ranch in 2009,” and Jeffs moved many children out of state (par. 15). The same charges were laid against Texas as against Arizona—the

FLDS made accusations of the state infringing on their religious rights and ripping apart their families (Heimlich, 2012).
*%

Further research may uncover the threads that run from 1953 to the present, and in the process discover further possible connections between press narratives and public and policy makers responses, as well as perhaps identify if there have been shifts in American national ideologies or whether they have stayed relatively constant since 1953. Life’s story is just one example of the many media texts in existence focusing on clashes between state and religious bodies that might be analyzed for ideological content with implications for social justice for children.

Perhaps in 1953 and today, failure to adequately protect children stems from a cycle of interconnected influences, some of which manifest in media framing of stories and subsequent reader reactions, including the reactions of decision makers. Taking into consideration the Short Creek 1953 story and its aftermath, perhaps it is time to consciously interrogate some of the scenarios invoking national myths and values with ideological implications. This is not to say that these values are necessarily negative, only that they should be examined to see if they are misused or abused on occasion, or as

McGee (1980) suggested, be used to “[excuse] behavior and belief that might otherwise be perceived as eccentric or antisocial” (McGee, 1980, p. 15). I would go further by suggesting that slogans like “family” or “religion” might be used to cover up not just

“eccentric or antisocial” behavior but sometimes behaviors that are criminal and harmful.

In view of the kinds of observations made by Guiora (2010), Hamilton (2005), and Gibson (2010) concerning religion and child abuse, it is vital to interrogate the immense power of religious freedom in the United States—what some have called

“freedom’s holy light” (Rose, 2008, par. 9). If we probe that sometimes-dazzling light, we may find perceptions of unlimited religious freedom, notions of the inviolability of
*& the family, and concepts of unrestricted parental control over children that might contribute to a toxic blend that leaves those children undefended. Freedom of religious belief is a vital ideal to be upheld, as is parental authority over children, but if state law enforcement or legislators fear to intervene in criminal activities because of the risk of being accused of religious persecution or undue interference in family life, there needs to be discussion or even redefinition of what exactly is protected. Such interrogations must inevitably involve debates about the limits of religious freedom, the “sacred” rights of family, and the best interests of the child.

What does the United States wish to see protected under its Constitution— religious belief, or any and every religious practice? Should states allow individuals or groups to use religion as a badge of immunity from justified state interest in so-called religious activities? What assumptions does society make when state or government questions the acts of mainstream or minority religious groups, particularly when the ideologies in these organizations may harm children? Even “harm” may need to be more clearly defined when scholars such a Smith (2010) appear to view harm as relative to a child’s cultural environment. Furthermore, if immediate harm is to be the criterion for removal of children, is this limited to the risk of immediate sexual abuse? Alternatively, should it include the harms that come from conditioning a child to see law breaking or sexual relationships between adults and children as normal or even necessary? As Erwin

(2009) in the William and Mary Law Review astutely pointed out:

Although parental belief systems alone are not sufficient to initiate removal proceedings, belief systems may lead parents to continue to place their children at risk because they remain loyal to their perception of a higher law and do not see the sexual practices of men in their community as harmful to children. (p. 1225)

Debates about “imminent harm” or the “best interests” of the child are obviously
*' complex. Public and lawmakers must continue to ponder and discuss these to create balance between unwarranted state interference in the lives of families while affording genuine protection to children. Pyle cited the rights of children as American citizens, but when these, as Guiora (2010) identified, may be subsumed in a hierarchy of other rights that sometimes places those of parents and adults first, is there some need to strengthen child entitlements?

Children’s Rights in the United States

This study by no means constitutes an attack on religion, on the press, or upon US national values. It only seeks for a re-evaluation of often-unquestioned family or religious rights within the United States that might serve to overshadow children’s rights, and a call for particular consideration of media framing of stories where children or victims are concerned, and where “taking sides” appears ethically dubious and irresponsible.

An important question to consider may be how much protection or how much real power US law offers to the nation’s children. While the United States may claim that its existing laws are already adequate for children, some disagree. Dr. Mary Ann Mason

(2005), Associate Director of the University of Berkeley’s Economics and Family

Security Center, and expert in children and family law, points out:

There is no comprehensive legal scheme to define and legislate children’s rights as there is with race and gender. And there has been an extreme reluctance to engage in any discourse about children’s rights as human rights such as have occurred with other vulnerable populations. (p. 956)

While the needs of many groups attract attention and necessary legislation, a reluctance to allow the same to children as a distinct group needs remedying. It is perhaps significant that the only UN nation members failing to ratify the United Nations
*(

Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNRC) were Somalia and the United States

(Mason, 2005). Nations who have ratified the treaty have given children a voice in judicial proceedings and protected them from sexual abuse within many contexts including child pornography and child prostitution (Mason, 2005). In spite of these benefits for children, familiar themes run through some objections to US ratification— fear that as the child gains more rights, parental rights or US pre-eminence will be eroded, and fear of governmental intrusion into family life. One family rights group has described the UNRC as “a serious threat both to parental rights and to U.S. sovereignty”

(Stahlecker, 2013, par. 2). These fears must be weighed and assessed against the needs of children.

There appears to be an underlying perception in some quarters that adult rights can be entirely isolated from child rights, when in fact too often the former has a huge impact on the latter. Looking outwards beyond the US may offer some solutions to specific problems already discussed in this paper. Research in the UK, for instance, which has faced increasing problems with underage unions or forced marriages within its

Muslim population, has recognized that changes in social work protocols may be necessary to help protect victims. The Royal Holloway, University of London, has cited the work of researchers there who recommended “mandatory training” for social workers that promotes an awareness that “normal practices, such as involving family members, may not be the best solution in forced marriage cases” (Lack, 2013, par. 2). This recognizes that sometimes parents are hostile to the best interests of the child, and that social workers must be aware of this.
*)

Since, as Condit (1980) suggested, “Rights’ are the moral prescriptions of sociopolitical units” (p. 85), further studies in multiple disciplines may generate the kinds of discussions needed at all levels to negotiate children’s rights or to decide if placing any limitations on adults’ rights to preserve children’s might be justified. US citizens must determine if religion is so sacrosanct that all state intervention in religious groups

(whether minority or mainstream), where abuse is suspected, is necessarily religious persecution.

Responding to Media Frames

The media is a powerful force in society and one to which the public looks for reliable, comprehensive, and preferably unbiased information on events. However, with news agencies owned by fewer and fewer consortiums, and when in fact “five global dimension firms . . . own most of the newspapers, magazines, book publishers, motion picture studios, and radio and television stations in the United States” (Bagdikian, 2004, p. 3), it is possible that editorial oversight might make partisanship such as Life’s, more, rather than less, likely.18 Nevertheless, media outlets need to be accountable for the material effects of their rhetorical construction of stories, particularly when those constructions may contribute to injustices or to silencing of victims or their advocates.

Media bias in some cases has serious ethical implications.

It is impossible to pinpoint Life’s handling of the Short Creek story as the nexus of the apathy (or fear) that appeared to take hold of officials in Arizona and Utah for so many years after 1953. As McKerrow (1989) has indicated, rhetorical influence is not the

18 See also Herman and Chomsky’s (2002) assessment of the same problem.
** same as an absolute determinism. “The Lonely Men of Short Creek” was only one story among many, but it is evident that the position Life occupied in American publishing at the time allows the claim that the story was significantly influential. Life took sides, and it was not the side of the child victims. If journalistic objectivity, as Luce claimed, is a myth, readers or viewers may be justifiably cautious about too easily following the leads and opinions of the media and should refrain from making assumptions that the views expressed therein are in fact, consensus opinion. There is also a need to be especially thoughtful about stories that invoke powerful national ideologies, and to question if these may be a distraction from silences or absences in the narrative that obscure or entirely conceal painful facts that ought to be revealed and faced. In this proposed process of greater rationality and awareness, analysts and researchers may play a role in making the unconscious, conscious, and the sometimes invisible, visible. A greater consciousness calls for a society willing to balance freedom with responsibility; to define what rights are truly unassailable; to support the administration of law in an even handed manner to all

US citizens regardless of religious affiliation; and to rationally evaluate what is oppressive government as opposed to justified state intervention in religious or family life.

Former Utah Attorney General Shurtleff asked in 2010, “Are we going to be limiting their freedom of religion if we intervene because the members of those communities are at risk? What is the role of the state in going in?” (p. 120). This is a vital question that lawmakers and the public must jointly decide, and decide independent of media direction. In taking action against abuse in families within religious communities
"!! to safeguard children, the state may very well be charged with paternalism, persecution, or worse; but when parents fail to safeguard their children, who else will protect them?

"!"

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