Mormons in New York City

While today having Sister Missionaries is expected, and is even the subject of Hollywood movies currently, that was not true in 1915, when an article in the March issue of the Church’s Improvement Era magazine wrote about the 14 ‘lady missionaries’ then serving in the Eastern States Mission. The report indicated that the women were serving in Boston, New Haven, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Baltimore and in the mission headquarters, then in Harlem. It included the following photo of the women serving:

Lady missionaries of the Eastern States Mission: Back row, left to right: Janette McNeil, Edna Crowther, Minnie, C. Poulson, Gertrude Phelps, Alta M. Johnson, Lona J. Ipsen, Lizzie O. Borgeson; middle row: Annie C. Peterson, Helga Pedersen, Mrs. Leona Monson, Ruth N. Savage, Viola Peterson; front row: Venna Monson, Zelma Peterson. (caption from the Improvement Era article.)

It is possible that the article (submitted by the mission to the Era) was inspired by a January article in the New York Tribune, which featured the two women serving there, Gertrude Phelps and Edna Crowther. Unfortunately, the article suggested that the lady missionaries would mainly attract the attention of the “man of the house”:

Fascinating disciples of Utah’s prophet have dismayed the Ridgewood section of Brooklyn by their activities in the Mormon cause. At least, the women residents are dismauyed and even horrified. If the emotions extend to the male inhabitants they conceal their feelings successfully. Which, of course, adds to the dismay and horror.

From door to door the engaging missionaries ply their trade. If the man or a man of the house answers their ring, there is sure to be a cosey chat, in the course of which the advantages of the Mormon religion are set forth.

The article also suggested that the reason lady missionaries were used was due to the start of World War I in Europe, even though the United States had not yet entered the conflict:

Their presence in this city is said to be a part of the Mormon activity that has developed here since the outbreak of hostilities in Europe necessitated the recall of many Mormon missionaries.

This idea is likely a supposition made by the reporter or some unnamed source. Since the first female missionaries were called 17 years earlier, in 1898, the influence of the war on the need for women in the mission field was minimal at best.

See:

http://wiki.nycldshistory.com/w/1915-03-Improvement_Era-Lady_missionaries_of_the_Eastern_States_Mission

http://wiki.nycldshistory.com/w/1915-01-26-New_York_Tribune-Women_in_pet_as_men_heed_fair_Mormon_aids

Both New York City and the Church have attracted their share of unusual characters, so when we look at the Church in New York City, the characters can act quite strange. Add to that attention from sometimes equally unusual anti-Mormons and the situation will appear in the newspaper. One such case arose in the early 1840s, when a tailor and actor named George J. Adams joined the Church.

Adams quickly became a significant part of the missionary efforts in the area, preaching regularly and traveling throughout the area. In the newspaper accounts of the time, it often seems like the newspapers thought that Adams was the main representative of the Church in New York City, because he is most often mentioned in coverage.

Aligned against Adams and the Church in New York City was an evangelical minister named George Montgomery West. Born in Ireland, West emigrated to New Brunswick where he was associated with the Methodists, who labeled him an intemperate and a fraud. He went on to Ohio, becoming an Episcopalian minister there, but ran afoul of them also. By 1842 he was in New York City, where he agreed to debate George J. Adams.

Their debates were the subject of newspaper reports from late June through the end of July as the debates shifted from Boston to New York City and then to Philadelphia. Each night they would entertain audiences who paid 12 cents each to hear Adams and West argue about the claims of the LDS Church for two hours. Each debater would speak for 20 minutes, and the two would alternate to fill up the time. The New York Herald report of the debate even reached the Times and Seasons newspaper in Nauvoo, which included one of the Herald articles word for word.

In Philadelphia the collusion of the two debaters in making their debate dramatic was on full display according to the Journal of Commerce, which reported:

At the latter part of his discourse he called out with Stentorian lungs, “where now is the celebrated and learned Dr. West? He knew I was coming to Philadelphia. Why does he not appear and vindicate Orthodoxy if in his power?” At this moment a portly figure started up and electrified the audience by stating, “Ladies and gentlemen, the person who has addressed you professes to speak by inspiration, but had he possessed what he professes, he would have known that Dr. WEST IS PRESENT, and now challenges him to prove the TRUTH of his monstrosities before this enlightened community.”

Whether these histrionic debates led to any additional conversions to the Church is anyone’s guess—history is silent on the matter. However, we do know something of what happened to Adams and West in the following years.

Following the Martyrdom, Adams, still in New York City, at first defended the Twelve’s leadership of the Church against the claims of Sidney Rigdon and his followers, but eventually followed James J. Strang, becoming a leader in his church. After Strang’s death, Adams returned to New York City and the stage before founding his own church. Convinced that the Jews would soon return to Palestine, he led his flock there and established a colony near Jaffa. When that failed, some of his followers returned to the U.S., by chance on the same ship as Mark Twain, who wrote about them in his book Innocents Abroad. Adams returned to the U.S. in 1870 and died soon after.

West fared little better. He joined a Presbyterian church in Brooklyn, but was convicted by them of falsehood and drunkenness. Still fighting the LDS Church, he joined the apostate John C. Bennett for a series of lectures. By 1850 he had joined a Presbyterian church in Albany, but his bad behavior ran afoul of that group as well, leading to the publication of a pamphlet titled “Impostures and calumnies of George Montgomery West,” (1850), and his grandiosely titled response, “The Living Martyr and the Unholy Alliance; Or Calumny Exposed, Truth Defended, and Character Vindicated, by Irrefutable Evidence.”

All this reminds me of the pithy saying my mother often cited:

People’s names and people’s faces
Don’t belong in public places.

There’s often a role for attracting attention, but too often the reason someone is attracting attention is for themselves, and not for the ideals they are teaching. That is, I think, true outside and inside the Church.