The New Morality

Stopping just short of atomic attack, Governor Howard Pyle declared war last July upon Arizona's only center of accepted polygamy. The Governor started by withdrawing $50,000 in emergency funds from the State Treasury declaring that the community of Short Creek was engaging in "insurrection" against the state. Pyle was incensed by the multiple marriages and directed the state attorney-general to charge the polygamists with "Bigamy, Adultery, Open and Notorious Cohabitation, Statutory Rape, Contributing to the Delinquency of Minors, Income-Tax Evasion, Misuse of School Funds, Falsifying Public Records, and Conspiracy to Violate State Laws."

At four one morning Pyle's forty armed deputies, and eighty pistol-packing highway patrolmen surrounded Short Creek and seized the town, placing it under martial law.

The opposition they met hardly justified the effort. Expecting the uninvited visitors the three hundred residents of the town assembled in the school-yard to wait for the invasion. When the swarm of deputies took over the town, they did so to the strains of the Star Spangled Banner sung by Short Creek residents as they hoisted a fluttering American flag into the dawn breeze. This exemplary patriotism did not deter the Law, and the town's thirty-six men were taken to jail; the eighty-six now-lonely women went to foster homes in Phoenix.

If the community was, as Governor Pyle termed it, "a lawless, commercial, undertaking dominated by a half-dozen greedy and licensed men who used religion as screen for systematic 'white slavery' and economic exploitation," it was a screne and prosperous enterprise. A visitor to Short Creek before the great raid would have found it much like any other American town, a little more prosperous than most, perhaps, because its Mormon principle of pooling cattle and grain left no one hungry.

A deeply religious man, Pyle declared himself "unalterably opposed to the wicked theory that every maturing child should be forced into multiple wifehood with the sole purpose of producing more children to become more chattels of this totally lawless enterprise." Possibly the Governor was thoroughly astounded by the fact that a three year old Short Creek boy was the great-great-grand-uncle of a three year old neighbor. Whether or not the tots liked the idea, the women were certainly happy. When informed that they were to live with only their legal husbands, seventy-five of them fled to Utah. Apparently they hoped that Governor Bracken Lee would refuse extradition, but Utah is no longer a haven for polygamy, and the women were turned over to the State of Arizona.

Arizona's form of justice last week crushed Short Creek for good. The Arizona Supreme Court ordered the men to live only with their legal wives, but most of the women have dispersed throughout the state since the Governor overturned the Short Creek variety of paradise. Now 162 children are left with unwed mothers to grow up in orphan homes with an ugly stigma. With only a lone bachelor and a monogamous couple left, Short Creek's fields of hay and barley will parch under the hot Arizona sun.

The Governor's shocked indignation impressed voters at first, perhaps, but the brutal conduct of the raid quickly disillusioned most and invited swarms of anti-Pyle editorials in Arizona's newspapers. One must wonder whether the satisfaction of moral absolutists in Phoenix is worth the problem caused in a hamlet two hundred miles from the nearest "civilized" metropolis of ten thousand people.