Josephine Spencer:

An Introduction
Faint and far in the night the wail of a child
Borne on heedful winds to a heedless ear;
Then, in the gray of a startled dawn, the wild,
Curdling cry of a million voices near.
 —­Josephine Spencer, “Revolution”

In December of 1898, readers of the San Francisco-based progressive magazine The

Coming Light got a special treat. Along with the usual progressive editorials and articles
were eight poems by a poet named Josephine Spencer, who was, at the time, the Society
Editor for a small, Mormon-owned paper called The Deseret News. The poems treated a
variety of subjects. Most of them were previously published nature poems reflecting the
beauty of Spencer’s home state—­columbine flowers, mountain lakes, and the Great Salt
Lake itself. One of the poems, though, never appeared anywhere else and had little to do
with external nature—­a short poem of only four lines with the title “Revolution.”
The first two lines of this new poem spoke of a crying child. The last two spoke of a
mass uprising. And its message to politicians and industrialists was crystal clear: heed the
cries of the children or face an uprising of the masses that will sweep you from power and
establish a new social order. It was a bold statement for a fin de siècle Mormon woman
to make. Utah had only been a state for two years, and much of the country still associ-
ated the Mormon Church with polygamy and apocalyptic violence. The larger American
culture still imagined Mormon women as passive captives of bearded polygamists—­and
certainly not as progressive revolutionaries out to destroy the capitalist social order.
Longtime readers of the magazine were likely confused at the inconsistencies between
what they thought about Mormon women and what they read in the magazine. But the

1
2 Introduction

author was no stranger to either religious incongruities or progressive politics. They were
a staple of her life and her career as one of the most prolific and versatile Mormon writers
of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
Josephine Spencer (1861–1928) may be the most significant figure in Mormon let-
ters that most people today have never heard of. Her career coincided with the period
that scholars now call the “Home Literature” movement in Mormon Utah. When she is
discussed at all, it is usually along with writers like Nephi Anderson (1865–1923), Susa
Young Gates (1856–1933), and Orson F. Whitney (1855–1931), who used Mormon his-
tory and theology as the basis for literature marketed to the faithful. Spencer’s career also
overlapped the period in American and British literature that produced dozens of dime
novels and pulp paperbacks that portrayed Mormons as violent fanatics who kidnapped
women into their harems and sent Danite enforcers all over the world to exterminate dis-
sidents. Nearly all of the literature by or about Mormons produced in Spencer’s lifetime
fell into one camp or the other—­either saccharine-sweet stories of faith and devotion
or sensationalistic dreck. It was a perilous time for a Mormon woman to set out to write
serious works of fiction and poetry.
Yet this is exactly what Josephine Spencer did. She wrote most of her work for
Latter-day Saint publications. She wrote lyric poems about the beauty of the Wasatch
mountains and charming love stories for young women, while, at the same time, writing
and submitting more challenging stories to national magazines and literary journals. And,
every once in a while, she wrote intensely political literature advocating gender equality,
labor unions, mass protests against capitalism, and the radical redistribution of wealth.
“The Senator from Utah”—­perhaps her most famous work and the title story of her only
book-length collection—­tells a sordid tale of corruption and attempted murder that lev-
els a blistering critique at American industrialism and political culture.
It would be difficult to imagine any of Josephine Spencer’s stories appearing in a
Church magazine today, or even being published by Deseret Book and sold in its stores,
as The Senator from Utah was in 1895. But Church publications played a very different
role in the Mormon world of the late-19th and early 20th centuries. Periodicals like The
Contributor and The Young Woman’s Journal supported the curriculum of the Mutual
Improvement Association, which had a secular as well as a religious mission. During this
period, most Latter-day Saints lived in rural areas without access to public education.
The M.I.A. functioned as a supplement to, and sometimes a substitute for, regular high
school courses. Weekly meetings would include political discussions and debating ses-
sions, as well as literary discussions from an annual reading list that featured books like
 Introduction 3

Samuel Johnson’s Rassselas, George Eliot’s Silas Marner, James Fenimore Cooper’s Last
of the Mohicans, and Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.1
The periodicals that supported this curriculum, and that published almost all of
Josephine Spencer’s fiction, were concerned with much more than providing religious
education to young people living in a secular world. Most of Spencer’s original readers
lived in an overwhelmingly religious and exclusively Mormon world, and the job of Church
curriculum was to introduce them to good things in the world beyond their own—­things
like literature and poetry and history and government that they would need to know
before Utah could take its place as an equal part of the American republic. Whether she
was writing for adults or adolescents, Spencer wrote primarily to show Mormons how they
could interact with ideas and cultures beyond their own.

THE LIFE OF JOSEPHINE SPENCER

Josephine Spencer was born in 1861 to a prominent Mormon family. Her father, Daniel
Spencer, had been the last mayor of Nauvoo before the Mormon Migration, as well as a
member of the secret political organization, the Council of Fifty, under Brigham Young.2
Spencer also served as a member of the Utah Territorial legislature in 1852, and as the
President of the Salt Lake City Stake from 1849 until his death in 1868. Josephine’s
mother, Emily, had originally been married to Daniel’s brother, Hyrum, who died at Winter
Quarters in 1846. Daniel, whose wife also died during the migration, married Emily in
1847, and they had six children together of which Josephine was the youngest.3
We can surmise what Josephine’s early life might have been like. As a member of
a large polygamous family whose patriarch held prominent positions in the Church and
community, she would have had a certain amount of privilege and prestige, even after

1.  See Michael Austin, “Thoughts on a New Youth Curriculum: How about the Old Youth
Curriculum?” By Common Consent, May 12, 2015. https://bycommonconsent.com/2015/05/12/
thoughts-on-a-new-youth-curriculum-how-about-the-old-youth-curriculum/
2.  The Council of Fifty minutes show that Daniel Spencer was approved for membership on March
1, 1845, “Council of Fifty, Minutes, March 1844–January 1846; Volume 1, 10 March 1844–1
March 1845,” p. [373, Fn 785]. JSP, CFM:3–204
3.  Emily was Daniel’s fourth monogamous wife. Sophronia Pomeroy died in 1832, Sarah Lester
Van Schoonoven, in 1834, and Mary (maiden name unknown) some time on the journey to Winter’s
Quarters. After marrying Emily in 1847, he would go on to marry three more wives polygamously
in 1856. He had a total of 23 children, two of whom died in infancy, with six of his wives. See Kylie
Nielson Turley, “Untrumpeted and Unseen: Josephine Spencer, Mormon ‘Authoress.’ ” Journal
of Mormon History 27.1 (Spring 2001), 127–164), Spring 2001, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Spring 2001),
129–30.
4 Introduction

her father died when she was seven years old. But growing up the daughter of one of
four widows, and 14 children, of such a man would have presented many economic
challenges. But all we can do is surmise. Spencer left no journals or letters behind that we
can read, or any descendants that we can turn to for oral family traditions. In “The Green
Street,” an autobiographical poem published in 1892, Spencer describes her childhood
as a pastoral utopia, but this probably had as much to do with the poetic conventions
she was working within as with actual memories from her childhood. But a reminiscence
written a few years after she died by Annie Wells Cannon suggests that Spencer had a
happy childhood and that she showed an active imagination from an early age.4
Because Spencer was an intelligent and highly motivated member of a prominent
Salt Lake City family, her name appears from time to time in the local newspapers in ways
that paint a highly fragmented, but nonetheless fascinating picture of her life as a young
woman. In 1878, the Women’s Exponent listed “Miss Jote Spencer”—­which Annie Wells
Cannon gave as Josephine’s childhood nickname5—­among a group of young women
who raised $925 for Yellow Fever sufferers by soliciting donations from the public.6
In May of 1880, the Salt Lake Herald lists her among the class of those receiving a
one-year certificate in English Language and Literature from the University of Deseret.7
Later that year, the same paper lists her as one of the organizers of a formal ball.8 In 1885,
her name appeared in several papers as a cast member for a Salt Lake City production
of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera The Mikado.9 And in 1889, Josephine Spencer
was announced as the second-place winner in the Herald’s Christmas Poetry contest
judged by none other than Orson F. Whitney—­the future apostle who, a year earlier,
had announced that Mormons “will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own” in
a speech to the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association.10 In making the award,
Whitney said that Spencer’s poem, “In Many Fanes,” was “of at least equal poetic merit
as the [first place poem], but not as distinctively a Christmas poem.”11

4.  See Josephine Spencer, “The Green Street,” in Woman’s Exponent 21 (December 1892): 81;
and Annie Wells Cannon, “Two Poets of State Street,” in Relief Society Magazine 19 (June 1932):
393–396. Turley explores both sources in “Untrumpeted,” 133–135.
5.  Canon 394.
6.  Woman’s Exponent, 15 Sep 1878, p. 5
7.  The Salt Lake Herald, 28 May 1880, p. 3.
8.  The Salt Lake Herald, 1 Oct 1880, p. 3
9.  Deseret News, 28 Oct 1885, p. 3; The Salt Lake Herald, 26 Nov 1885, p. 8
10.  Whitney’s speech, “Home Literature,” was originally delivered as a speech at the Y.M.M.I.A.
Conference, June 3, 1888 and published in the June 1888 issue of The Contributor (pp. 297–301).
11.  The Salt Lake Herald, 4 Dec 1889, p. 8.
 Introduction 5

Soon after winning this award, Spencer became a fixture of the Utah literary scene.
We have been able to locate some sixty-seven poems that she published, mainly in
Utah papers and journals, between 1887 and 1899. Two of her poems—­“Longing”
and “Poetry”—­were featured in the book Songs and Flowers of the Wasatch, which was
printed especially for the Utah exhibition at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. In 1891,
she published the first of more than eighty short stories she would write in her life, with
the majority appearing in official LDS publications. Her only book—­The Senator from
Utah (1895)—­was published by the Deseret News Press, the forerunner of today’s
Deseret Book Corporation. Around the turn of the century, she began placing her sto-
ries in national magazines, including the work already mentioned that appeared in The
Coming Light, but also in Overland Monthly, the Youth’s Companion, Pearson’s Magazine,
Munsey’s Magazine, and the early science-fiction and fantasy journal, The Black Cat.12
The Salt Lake Herald reported in 1905 that she had been asked to write a novel by Bobbs-
Merril publishing house in Indianapolis, though such a novel never materialized.13
Josephine Spencer never married, and, for most of her adult life, was a working
professional journalist. She traveled to Chicago herself to report on the World’s Fair
Exposition for the Deseret News.14 She continued to work for the Deseret News, even-
tually rising to the position of Literary and Society Editor. In 1901, she became one of
the founding officers of the Utah Women’s Press Club, whose other officers included
Emmeline B. Wells and Susa Young Gates.15 She continued working at the Deseret News
and writing poems and short stories for Church publications until sometime in 1921 or
1922, when she relocated permanently to California after a debilitating breakdown.16 In

12.  “Joe” (story), The Youth’s Companion, Volume 72, Number 48 (December 1, 1898), 1–3;
“Night” (poem) Overland Monthly, Vol 33, Number 196 (April, 1999), 332–33; “Eph Follett’s
Monument” (story) The Black Cat. September 1899, 39–44; “McClosky’s Kid” (story) Pearson’s
Magazine Volume 13, Number 4 (April 1905), 365–370; “To Him Who Waits” (poem), Munsey’s
Magazine Volume 34, Number 5 (February 1906), 552.
13.  The Salt Lake Herald 2 Apr 1905, p. 6.
14.  Neilson, Reid L. Exhibiting Mormonism: The Latter-Day Saints and the 1893 Chicago World’s
Fair (Oxford University Press, 2011), 49–50.
15.  “History of the U.W. Press Club.” Woman’s Exponent, 1 October, 1907, 7.
16.  Spencer’s 1928 obituary in the Deseret News claims that she “had resided in Salt Lake all of
her life until about six years ago when she moved to Pasadena, California to recover from a serious
breakdown.” (Deseret News, 29 Oct 1928, p. 9). This would place her move in 1922, but a 1921
notice in the Salt Lake Tribune advertises a meeting of a Short Story Club that will read a work “by
Josephine Spencer of Pasadena, formerly of this city.” (Salt Lake Tribune, 29 May, 1921, p. 55)
6 Introduction

California, she continued her career in journalism as a music critic for the Pasadena Star
until her death in 1928.17
Perhaps the most intriguing references to Josephine Spencer’s personal story come
in 1898, with two references to her role in the Utah Populist Party. On September 11, the
Salt Lake Herald listed her as one of 70 delegates to the Populist’s State Convention in
Salt Lake City.18 And on October 9, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that “Mrs. Katie Silvers
was named [the Populist candidate] for the County Auditorship, as Miss Josephine
Spencer, the convention nominee, declined to make the race.”19 These tiny glimpses tell
us that Spencer was heavily invested in the Populist Party—­perhaps the most successful
third party in American history—­during the height of its influence. And it tells us that
other populists thought highly enough of her to nominate her for an office that she had no
intention of seeking. These insights are key to understanding the stories in The Senator
from Utah and much of her other work that seems so incongruous with her place in the
Mormon Home Literature movement.
When modern readers encounter the stories in The Senator from Utah, they invari-
ably describe them with vocabularies drawn from Marxism or socialism. In an excellent
Association for Mormon Letters paper delivered in 2003, Kylie Nielsen Turley—­who
wrote her M.A. thesis at BYU on Josephine Spencer—­teases out many of the Marxist
elements of the story by employing Stephen Greenblatt’s vocabulary of the subversion
and containment of radical ideas.20 This is a very productive and necessary way to read
the text today. However, the vocabulary of Marxism was not well known—­for good or for
evil—­to Spencer’s original readers, who lived before the Cold War, the Stalinist Gulags,
or the Russian Revolution.
In 1892, when “The Senator from Utah” first appeared, the closest thing to
“Marxism” that most people understood was “anarchism”—­the revolutionary doctrine
that produced Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President William McKinley in 1901.
Anarchists do appear in Spencer’s fiction, but the authorial voice does not side with
them, any more than it sides with the political and financial interests that they oppose.
She often presents the two groups as equally guilty of indefensible actions and as equally

17.  Salt Lake Telegram, 13 Mar 1923, 2.

18.  The Salt Lake Herald, 11 Sep 1898, p. 8.
19.  The Salt Lake Tribune, 19 Oct 1898, p. 5.
20.  Turley, Kylie Neilsen, “’Dangerous Questions Affecting Closer Interests’: Subversion and
Containment in ‘The Senator from Utah’.” Annual of the Association for Mormon Letters, 2004,
179–86. Archived at http://associationmormonletters.org/blog/aml-publications-documents/
aml-annuals/aml-annual-2004/
 Introduction 7

flawed in their approach to social problems. The heroes of the story all occupy—­or end
up converting to—­the middle ground between anarchism and capitalism. “The Senator
from Utah” closes with its principal hero, Allan Glenfaun, affirming this middle ground
after foiling a plot against the lives of the union organizers who were, in turn, concocting
a plot against the life of the Senator:

“I have only one thing to ask,” said Allan to the men as they stood about
outside, in quiet groups, “that you will take this lesson home, remem-
bering that the treacherous plot which was concocted for our death, is
no worse than the one you had determined in your hearts to deal to oth-
ers. Let the memory of it inspire you to act like men with rights to strive
for—­not criminals serving a false cause with deeds of blood. Rejoice
that the way is still open; that before you still beckon the pathways that
lead to that freedom and peace which only right methods may win and
retain. (p. 7)

Spencer appears to have supported the ends of the labor movement but not the
means of the anarchists—­which was the position that most populists took in 1892. That
same year, the Populist Party ran its first presidential candidate, James Weaver, who
supported labor unions and public ownership of the railroads and other utilities—­along
with the redistribution of wealth through a graduated national income tax. Weaver ran
a respectable third-party campaign capturing 8.5% of the popular vote and carrying
five Western states, including Nevada, Idaho, and Colorado—­the three states bordered
Utah Territory. In 1896, populists nominated William Jennings Bryan, who also secured
the Democratic nomination and carried 22 of the 45 states—­including Utah, which had
been a state for less than a year when it cast its first votes in a presidential election.
Bryan did not just squeak out a narrow victory in Utah’s first presidential contest;
he crushed McKinley 83% to 17%. It is hard to see Spencer’s political positions in
The Senator from Utah as terribly radical when the Mormons in her community voted
overwhelmingly for a candidate who held most of these positions just a year after the
collection was published. Mormons recognized the outlines of their own United Order
experiences in the Populist platform—­and they saw a role for their plentiful silver depos-
its in Bryan’s fanatic opposition to the gold standard. As radical as Spencer’s political
stories strike modern Mormon readers today, they were well within the mainstream that
she and the first generation of her readers took for granted.21

21.  For more background, see Herbert E. Cihak’s 1975 M.A. Thesis, Bryan, Populism and Utah,
archived at https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5601&context=etd
8 Josephine Spencer—Her Collected Works

Most of Spencer’s stories and poems lack the political bite of the stories in The
Senator from Utah. Her early short fiction represents a broad sampling of 19th-century
fictional genres. Her first published story, “Descendant of an Ancestor,” is a “lost-world”
adventure story that pays homage to British author H. Rider Haggard. Several of her
other stories—­including “A Lost Inheritance,” “Private Parmelee,” and “Lola”—­are
Western adventure stories featuring Indian raids, lost treasure, cattle thieves, and das-
tardly murders. Stories like “Rolfe Ainslee’s Temptation” and “Her Life’s Lesson” are
domestic morality tales with characters who realize their moral failings and correct their
courses. “Judith Dare; A Story of the Revolution” is a historical romance set during the
American Revolution. And “Cross Lines,” Spencer’s first story to appear in The Young
Woman’s Journal, is a ghost story.
Both the state of Utah and the religion of Mormonism function as backdrops to
Spencer’s early stories, but only three of them have plots that revolve around the Mormon
experience. The first of these—­”Jeddie Holt’s Reward,” is the heartwarming story of a
young disabled boy who wants to attend the dedication of the Salt Lake City Temple.
The second, “A Trial of Hearts,” shows how polygamy continued to affect Mormon com-
munities after the Manifesto. The third story, Suzanne, is the fact-based narrative of a
German-Russian woman who converts to Mormonism in Palestine and emigrates to Utah.
Both Utah and Mormonism appear more prominently in Spencer’s poetry than in her
prose. The majority of her early published poems are either lyrical tributes to the natural
beauty of the Wasatch or narrative retellings of significant events in Mormon history, like
“The Miracle of the Gulls” and “The Approach of the Army.” But she also wrote poetry
about the “untrumped and unseen” contributions of women (“Recognition”), the dev-
astation of war (“Days of Warfare”), the brotherhood of humanity (“The Hour”), and, of
course, “Revolution.” Josephine Spencer was a feminist, an environmentalist, a pacifist,
and a socialist long before any of these words became labels of apostasy or rebellion
among the Latter-day Saints.
The work of Josephine Spencer deserves to be read and studied by a new generation
of readers and scholars who want to understand where modern Mormonism came from.
Spencer wrote actively and prolifically for more than 30 years, and her work defies easy
classification or consistent labeling—­so, in planning a volume of her “collective works,”
we decided to collect as much as we could and let readers determine its literary and
historical value. We originally planned a one-volume collection of her work, but as we
discovered more and more poems and stories that had not been part of the “Spencer
Canon” before, we realized that a single volume would need to be a thousand-page
 Introduction 9

Behemoth that would be expensive to print and difficult to read. So we used 1900 as
a logical breaking point in Spencer’s writings and made plans for a two-volume series.
We have divided the first volume into three sections. First come the stories collected
in A Senator from Utah. As five of these seven stories were published earlier, it might
have made sense to simply publish them in their original sequence and divide the anthol-
ogy into “Poetry” and “Prose.” However, Spencer herself created the book because she
believed that these seven stories went together to create something distinct from her
larger body of work. Following The Senator from Utah, we reprint all of her remaining
stories between 1891 and 1899 in chronological order with occasional, but minimal
footnotes to clarify context or publication history. And finally, we present the sixty-seven
poems that Spencer published between 1887 and 1899, also in chronological order.
We once believed that we had something like a comprehensive collection of
Spencer’s poetry and fiction. However, new avenues of research kept producing new
poems or new stories in venues that we had not thought to look in before. Spencer sent
her work out to small journals and magazines across the country, and we have no sur-
viving correspondence or collection of her works to cross-reference. We found several
of these works by accident and good fortune, looking at random in literary journals or
searching for stray comments in Utah newspapers about the famous Miss Spencer’s
recent literary triumphs. We can say with something approaching existential certainty
that this is not an exhaustive collection. There are still works by Josephine Spencer to
be discovered—­and probably some that will be lost forever because no copies of the
magazines they appeared in have survived.
In the meantime, we have access to a phenomenal body of work from one of the early
Mormon world’s most talented writers. Her writing opens a window on what ordinary
members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were reading and thinking
about in 1890, when Wilfred Woodruff issued the Manifesto ending the practice of plural
marriage; in 1896, when Utah became a state; between 1904 and 1907, when the nation
was transfixed by the Reed Smoot hearings; and in 1912, when Zane Grey’s anti-Mor-
mon novel Riders of the Purple Sage became one of the bestselling books of all time.
For Josephine Spencer, these events were just the deep background for her stories and
poems about flawed human beings—­some of whom happened to be Mormons—­trying
to make their way in a world of surprising beauty, tragic inequality, and just enough divine
grace to make it all work out in the end.
 Contents
Josephine Spencer: An Introduction 1

THE SENATOR FROM UTAH

The Senator from Utah 15
A Municipal Sensation 45
Finley Parke’s Problem 61
Maridon’s Experiment 75
Letitia83
Mariposa Lilies 99
Hester115

STORIES: 1891–1899
The Descendant of an Ancestor 133
Rolfe Ainslee’s Temptation 147
A Lost Inheritance 159
Jeddie Holt’s Reward 179

v
vi Contents

Judith Dare; A Story of the Revolution 189

A Trial of Hearts 217
Private Parmelee 233
Lola253
Suzanne267
Her Life’s Lesson 285
A Timely Trial 299
Joe309
The Mystery of Jack Dowe’s Desertion 319
Cross Lines 327
Eph Follett’s Monument 343

POETRY: 1887–1899
Spring’s Dynasty 351
The Legend of the Cross 354
Scene at a Silver Lake 358
In Many Fanes 359
Salt Lake 364
Bereavement365
God and Nature 367
Music369
The Evening Primrose 372
The Sister’s Charge 373
Christ’s Gift 377
Again379
Mariposa Lilies 381
Pre-Existence383
Sunset Sonnets 385
Truth in Myth 386
 Contents vii

April388
The Valley 389
A Mountain Lake 391
The Curse of Adar 392
The Mountain Brook 398
Daisies400
Silver Lake 401
Scenes in the Wasatch 403
Twilight405
Columbines407
March: A Lay of Chivalry 408
The World’s Way 410
Winter411
November412
Salt Lake Valley 413
Autumn414
Dreams416
The Gladiolus 418
August in Salt Lake Valley 420
Left by the Roadside 421
Truth’s Miracles 422
Confession424
Love Song 426
Deseret428
The Green Street 433
Lake Mary 436
The Hero of the Flood 439
Dawn442
God’s Image 443
Summer Rain 444
Serenade446
Violets447
viii Contents

A Song of Winter 449

Westward Ho! 451
Lake Annette 453
The Miracle of the Gulls 454
Alfalfa457
The Approach of the Army 458
Longing466
Poetry468
The Temple 469
Recognition472
Moonlight at Saltair 474
A Study 476
Wild Flowers 480
Forests482
Wild Columbines 484
The Hour 485
Revolution486
Days of Warfare 487
Night490