by CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN
The carpenter Miles Archibald Romney converted to Mormonism in Lower Penwortham in 1837. Four years later he and his wife Elizabeth left England for Nauvoo, Illinois. There he built Joseph Smith a temple that was not quite completed when the prophet was shot dead by a mob. Another mob burned down Miles’s temple, and he fled Nauvoo with his family. Hounded by animals, Indians and more mobs, they made their way to Salt Lake City, where he helped Brigham Young build a temple that still stands. Young sent Miles and his son, Miles P., to St George, Utah, where they built a tabernacle and a temple. Young commanded Miles P. to take more than one wife; he took five. He led the Mormon campaign against anti-polygamy laws, was harassed by marshals, and from time to time sent one or two of his wives into cornfields or mountain hideouts to escape arrest. In Arizona the editor of the Apache Chief called him ‘a mass of putrid pus and rotten goose pimples; a skunk, with the face of a baboon, the character of a louse, the breath of a buzzard and the record of a perjurer and common drunkard’. Miles P. crossed the border and set up a polygamous colony in Mexico. There his son Gaskell built a cattle farm and a door factory, but lost it all when revolutionaries besieged the colony. The family fled to El Paso. ‘I was kicked out of Mexico when I was five years old because the Mexicans were envious of the fact that my people … became prosperous,’ Gaskell’s son George said. George chased a Mormon girl called Lenore to Hollywood, rescued her from a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract, took her to Detroit, ran a car company, became governor of Michigan, then squandered his lead over Nixon in the race for the Republican nomination in 1968 by saying he’d been ‘brainwashed’ by generals who told him the Vietnam War could be won. Last month his son Mitt arrived in Tampa persecuted for being a millionaire 250 times over, accused of sacrificing American workers on the altar of his own wealth, his status as a human the subject of national doubt.
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