Richard R. Lyman, Joseph F Merrill, James E Talmadge, and John A Widstoe served as 20th century apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They were not officially titled “Elders” as other apostles were but were officially titled as “Doctors” because they all held ph.Ds in various sciences. They illustrated for the church’s public image that its leaders were respectable educated intellectuals -- not Rocky Mountain Yahoos. They stood out in contrast to certain apostles, notably Elder Joseph Fielding Smith, who was the most fundamental creationist apostle of that period.
Fifty years ago last week, the last of these ph.D “Doctor apostles” died. Richard R Lyman died on 31 December 1963. LDS Church president Joseph F. Smith had ordained him an apostle in 1918, a year after his apostle father — President of the Quorum of the Twelve Francis Lyman – died. His grandfather, Elder Amasa Lyman, had also served as an apostle in the 19th century.
BACKGROUND.
Both of these apostle ancestors practiced plural marriage – multiple wives at one time. Joseph Smith, the founder of the LDS Church, received revelations about polygamy in the 1830s and probably married his first plural wife in that decade. He certainly taught the principle in the 1840s and married multiple women in the period of 1841 - 1844 before his assassination. The First Presidency continued to preach The Principle and allowed many men to marry multiple wives from 1844 to 1890. In 1890, as a result of intense cultural problems and federal government threats, President Wilford Woodruff advised Church members to avoid marriages unlawful in the United States. The First Presidency stopped authorizing plural marriages in April 1904.
NOW THE STORY.
With this background in mind, we noted that when Richard R. Lyman died, he was the last apostle of two other situations. One – he was the last LDS apostle who cohabited with two women in different households. Two – he is currently the last LDS apostle excommunicated from the Church.
Lyman’s legal wife was Amy Brown Lyman, a professional social worker who served in the Church’s women’s organization, the Relief Society. She served in various leadership positions and callings from 1909 to 1945. In 1940, President Heber J Grant called her to serve as the society’s president. She probably would have served longer if it had not been for the conjunction of the next woman.
Anna S. Jacobsen Hegsted was Lyman’s second woman companion – a woman who had been involved in post-manifesto plural marriage, divorced, excommunicasted from the LDS Church, then restored to membership. Lyman received the assignment to oversee her restoration.
Four issues came into conjunction in Lyman’s life. Researchers Gary Bergera and Dennis Michael Quinn studied these in detail in various books and articles. It is hard to tell if any of these claims really are true, but here they are for this article and discussion.
CLAIM 1. Amy Brown Lyman stopped having sexual relations with Richard R Lyman after the birth of their last child and concentrated on her career. Witnesses of the Lyman household report separate bedrooms, not just separate beds.
CLAIM 2. Lyman sealed Anna to himself in 1925, an unusual sort of plural marriage act that had precedent in 19th century LDS Church history.
or CLAIM 3. Lyman and Anna vowed that when one of them died, the other would perform a proxy sealing for themselves for eternity in a temple.
CLAIM 4. Lyman admitted to becoming intimate with Anna as early as 1938. Whether he really involved himself with her earlier is, of course, subject of some speculation and discussion.
FURTHER BACKGROUND.
In 1933, some of the LDS Church’s members with authorized plural wives and members who had unauthorized plural wives started organizing a polygamist Mormon-type Church in opposition to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Church. First Presidency Counselor J. Reuben Clark founded a surveillance spy network to gather information on them and to excommunicate them from the main church.
BACK TO THE STORY.
In early November 1943, one of Clark’s spies discovered a veritable bombshell of a secret information – apostle Lyman was keeping company with a woman not his wife. Clark, by then defacto acting Church president for Heber J Grant in fragile declining health, took two apostles – Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold B Lee – into his confidence about this situation and assigned them to track Lyman at night. Shortly thereafter, Clark advised Quorum of the Twelve President George Albert Smith of the alleged details; Smith prepared for a disciplinary council. Joseph Fielding Smith and Lee discovered conclusive facts about Lyman and Jacobsen Hegsted: Clark convinced the Salt Lake police to raid the two of them in Jacobsen Hegsted’s house at night. The police caught them inflagrato delecti. President Smith convened a disciplinary council of apostles who excommunicated both Lyman and (eventually) Jacobsen from the LDS Church. They were both in their 70s in age. This ended Richard Lyman’s ministry as an apostle, where apostles ended their ministries at death.
When President George Albert Smith wrote an excommunication announcement, printed in the Salt Lake City Deseret News newspaper, he described the reason for Lyman’s excommunication this way: for a violation of the Christian Law of Chastity. This was technically true. The Church never regarded officially Lyman’s act as technically plural marriage cohabitation after 1904.
SPECULATING
What about Amy Lyman?
Then as now, those in the know about the situation must have viewed her in one of two ways –
Either
She knew about the relationship from 1925 to 1943 and therefore enabled her husband’s sin
or
She did not know about the relationship from 1925 to 1943 and thus was so utterly unobservant that it put her intellectual capacity and leadership ability into question. Even if Lyman started the illicit part of the relationship in 1938, the questions about Amy remain the same.
Church leadership did not excommunicate Amy Lyman. Apparently it preferred to regard her as clueless, not an enabler. However, within a year and a half, the First Presidency released her as Relief Society general president. The previous president had served for years; the next president served nearly 30 years. Her husband’s situation, though, ruined Amy’s reputation sufficiently that it made it impossible for her to go on as Relief Society general president.
What about Richard Lyman?
Eventually the Church authorized his rebaptism and his return to church membership in 1954. But one aspect about his marriage adventure remains mystifying.
Salt Lake City, then as now, is a small city. Church headquarters culture is a village almost as tight and gossipy as The Vatican. How did Lyman do this relationship from 1925 to 1943 without someone noticing before November 1943?
These are interesting questions, but useless to ask. Many questions of history simply go unanswered, sometimes unacknowledged.
Two things to consider from all this –
LDS Culture might have been influenced positively if Richard Lyman had insisted on a right as an apostle to divorce a wife that no longer fit his life needs. LDS leadership culture might have been influenced positively if The First Presidency had implemented another of his ideas. Two years before his excommunication when the Church leadership contemplated added extra apostles or assistants to the apostles to the official leadership, he advocated retirement for older apostles.
The Lord may have tolerated polygamy; the Old Testament certainly leaves that impression. The Lord may have tolerated modern Mormon polygamy for a while, and then he ordered it stopped when it could not work anymore. LDS polygamy may have been a mistake all the way around. If the 2013 scripture edition’s ambiguous preface to “Official Document 1" indicates anything, it indicates the current First Presidency wants to ignore or deny that history and get on with life. "History," Henry Makow once wrote," is propaganda IE a cover up." The human mind may abhor ambiguity, but ambiguity there is in all history in general and LDS history in particular. The ambiguity of Plural marriage left a long shadow over LDS Culture, over the LDS Church, and the official LDS leadership
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