‘They Are Known to Have Traveled’: The Mann Act, the FBI, and the First Raid of the FLDS

In 1944, the FBI in conjunction with Utah authorities raided Mormon fundamentalists and charged sixteen men and twelve women with a host of state and federal crimes, among them violation of the White Slave Traffic Act, for engaging in polygamy. The so-called “Boyden raid” led to a pair of Supreme Court decisions defining “immorality” for the purposes of federal law and was the first significant state action against a religious group – the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) – that has continued to be the focus of state scrutiny in subsequent decades.

The Boyden raid left in its wake 2,000 pages of FBI records that until now have not been analyzed – perhaps in part because, despite its historical and judicial significance, this chapter in FLDS history was quickly overshadowed by the 1953 “Short Creek raid” and most recently by Texas’ history-making 2008 raid of the group’s YFZ Ranch. The Boyden raid and subsequent court action have been described in some detail in Martha Sonntag Bradley’s 1993 history of the FLDS, but little has been written about it since. This paper will use the FBI’s files on the case to show how the White Slave Traffic Act prosecutions of the 1940s provide an important window into the relationship between new religions, the state, and the policing of American sexuality.

Jessica Pliley has explored in detail how the FBI used the White Slave Traffic Act – now more commonly called the Mann Act – to construct and police heteronormative, monogamous, patriarchal sexuality until the start of World War 2. Likewise, Lerone Martin has shown how J. Edgar Hoover’s Bureau was instrumental in the creation of White Christian nationalism in the decades after the war. This paper links those stories, using FBI records to show how the Bureau pursued convictions and deportation against people it considered deviant – sexually, religiously, and (following Paul Reeve’s work) racially – in the middle of the war.

The FBI produced thousands of pages of documents – memos, news clippings, forms, reports, interview transcripts, and photographs – over the course of its investigation into the FLDS’s polygamous practices. This is the first known analysis of these files, which show how the FBI swept into its investigatory net men and women it suspected of violating White patriarchal norms of monogamous sexuality, not only threatening their freedom but their citizenship. Pliley has described how the Mann Act initially was a tool to target foreign-born sex workers; this paper will show how the FBI used the same tactics to investigate the naturalization status of foreign-born plural wives.

Ultimately, as this paper will argue, the FBI took upon itself not only the prosecution of alleged crimes involving sexual, racial, or religious deviance, but also the definition of Americanness itself, making clear that groups like the FLDS stood outside its acceptable limits.