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MLA: Parshall, Ardis E. ""I Take Up My Pen": The American Anti-Mormon Association, 1907." Keepapitchin.org, 23 Mar 2015, https://keepapitchinin.org/2015/03/23/i-take-up-my-pen-the-american-anti-mormon-association-1907/.

APA: Parshall, A. (2015, Mar 23). "I Take Up My Pen": The American Anti-Mormon Association, 1907. Keepapitchinin.org. https://keepapitchinin.org/2015/03/23/i-take-up-my-pen-the-american-anti-mormon-association-1907/

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11 thoughts on ““I Take Up My Pen”: The American Anti-Mormon Association, 1907”

  1. Goodness. Since this is Neal’s stationery, here’s a biography from FindAGrave:

    Robert Burns Neal

    He was known as “R. B. Neal, the ‘Mormon-Fighter.'”

    The president, James Darby, was an Ohio lawyer. A quick look at Google suggest most of the officers of the association may be clerics. Thinking of Patrick Mason’s book The Mormon Menace, it’s not a coincidence that most of them were Southerners.

  4. Yes, given the history of the Klan, including the history of the Klan in Utah, there’s a very good chance that the two groups overlapped.

  5. A bit of additional snooping dug up another organization which appears to be related–maybe it’s a predecessor: The National Anti-Mormon Missionary Association of the Churches of Christ. (The date I found for them was 1902.) The Disciples of Christ (of which Mr. Neal was a minister) and the Churches of Christ were two of the organizations that evolved from the Restorationist movement of Alexander Campbell. It was among those groups that early missionaries in the Western Reserve had such success, bringing Sidney Rigdon and Parley P Pratt and a host of others into the LDS church.

    I don’t know if there was any leftover antipathy toward the Mormons based upon what had happened in northeastern Ohio nearly 80 years earlier. I do know that there are substantial disagreements even now between the Calvinists–the Southern Baptists, mainly–and the heirs of those Restorationists. And that makes me wonder if the KKK would have drawn its members largely from one side of that divide or the other. Maybe if they all wore white hoods over their faces they didn’t know or care.

  6. Here’s an excerpt of a description of the Rev. R.B. Neal:

    R. B. Neal is a Kentucky preacher. He was born in Georgetown, Ky., in 1847; was married in Louisville in 1876; moved to the mountains of Kentucky in 1893; is a vigorous, contenuous fighter of saloonism, Calvinism, Mormonism and devilism of any sort or kind.

    If you can get saloonism, Calvinism, Mormonism and devilism in the same room all at once, you’re obviously in a different league than the rest of us.

  10. I want to be a practicing Mormonist saloonist. I think that means haging out at the soda fountain. I’ll skip out on the Calvinist devilist teachings and join Neal in his fight against such things-if he will have me.

  11. I have ancestors who were from Grayson, who eventually headed out to California. Since both my parents and paternal grandparents are all first generation members, I don’t know much about their religious associations while they were there, but they had all left by thepoint.e late 1890s.

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