Still, there weren’t many blacks in Mitt’s exclusive neighborhood of Bloomfield Hills. Mitt’s primary exposure to black people was his family’s beloved housekeeper, Birdie Nailing, and a fellow student, Sidney Barthwell, Jr., whose father had worked with George Romney in revising the state’s constitution. Coming from Detroit to attend Cranbrook, Barthwell had entered a different world. “It was primarily white WASP. I was the only African-American student in our graduating class,” Barthwell said. Though Mitt and Sidney were not close, they were friendly and went through all six years at the school together. It made an impression on Barthwell that the Romney family opposed the Mormon prohibition against blacks holding the priesthood. His recollection of Mitt is that he seemed like a “very nice guy” although “not a standout student.” During one of his father’s gubernatorial campaigns, Mitt and his brother, Scott, were sent to talk to African Americans in a Detroit neighborhood, and they came away pleased that their father was respected by blacks, even if they didn’t receive assurances of votes.
In his final years at Cranbrook, Mitt emerged a more serious student and a good-looking teen. Adding to the package was his great head of hair. Mitt had grown up hearing people comment on his father’s sweep of slicked-back black hair, white at the temples. But since his early teens, Mitt had patterned his own hairstyle after a man named Edwin Jones, who served as his father’s top aide in running the Detroit operations of the Mormon church. “He sat up front, to the side at a desk, keeping records,” Mitt would recall years later. “I remember that he had very dark hair, that it was quite shiny, and that you could see it in distinct comb lines from front to back. Have you looked at my hair? Yep, it’s just like his was some forty years ago.”
When graduation arrived, the speaker was none other than George Romney. He hit upon a surprising theme. Girlfriends, the governor told the seventy-six graduating boys, “will have more to do with shaping your life than probably anybody else. . . . If the girl you’re interested in doesn’t inspire you to greater effort than you would undertake without knowing her, then you’d better look around and get another.”
Mitt had looked around and, just like his father, had found at a relatively early age the girl he wanted to marry. Her name was Ann Davies, and she was beautiful, smart, and independent-minded. The parallels to Mitt’s mother were unmistakable. But there was one difference—and a major problem: Ann was not a Mormon; she came from a mainline Protestant family.
Mitt had first met Ann when they were both in elementary school in Bloomfield Hills. He was dressed in his Cub Scout uniform and saw Ann riding her horse over the railroad tracks. He picked up some stones and threw them at her, he recalled years later. They lost track of each other over the years. Then they were at neighboring prep schools. Ann attended Cranbrook’s sister school, Kingswood, on the other side of campus. Mitt had just turned eighteen and Ann was fifteen, almost exactly the same ages his parents had been when they met. One day, Mitt went to a friend’s birthday party. Across the room, he spied Ann. “Wow, has she changed,” Mitt said he thought to himself. He went over to Ann’s date and offered to drive Ann home.
Cranbrook in the 1960s still adhered to a strict separation of the sexes. The girls were allowed to see the boys for athletic events, dance lessons, and a weekly movie night in the gym. Beyond that, their interaction largely was confined to letters, which the Kingswood girls lined up to receive daily. Shortly after they ran into each other at the party, Mitt asked Ann out for a date. It was March 21, 1965, and they saw the movie The Sound of Music. “I caught his eye and he never let me go,” Ann recalled years later. “I mean, he hotly pursued me.” They fell “deeply in love,” she said, but “we didn’t tell anyone, because no one would have believed it.” Mitt later said, “I fell in love with her the second I saw her.”
When Ann arrived at the Kingswood School, she wasn’t much interested in academics; that would come later. She was more into riding horses and playing field hockey, lacrosse, basketball, and tennis. Mitt learned to keep up. They strode across the sprawling Cranbrook campus, past the lake, amid the emerald landscape with its bubbling pools and surfeit of sculptures. Mitt taught Ann how to water-ski, and they went almost every day when the weather allowed. She taught him to snow-ski. She found Mitt funny and fun to be with, and “no matter where he was, there was a lot of action.” Other boys pursued her, and she would date them in Mitt’s absence, but she said Mitt “stole my heart from the very first.”
Ann, like Mitt, had grown up in Bloomfield Hills. Her father, Edward R. Davies, was the city’s former mayor and had become the wealthy president of Jered Industries, which made maritime machinery. He was also something of an inventor. One time, her father got mad at her and her two brothers for not closing a sliding door. So he built a pulley system that automatically closed the door. Ann considered him a “creative genius.” What Mitt didn’t know about Ann was that she had been brought up in a home with a father who had no use for religion, and that she had been on a spiritual search since a young age. Her father had grown up in a coal-mining family in Wales, and Ann’s brothers say he associated the religion of his childhood—a Welsh Congregational church he found as dreary as the climate of Wales—with drudgery and hogwash. Before their dad married their mom, Lois Davies, he insisted that she give up organized religion. “Dad,” said Ann’s older brother, Roderick Davies, “considered people who were religious to be weak in the knees.”
But like Mitt, Ann had a special relationship with her father. So he occasionally indulged his only daughter’s requests that the family attend services at one Protestant church or another. He remained unswayed by the pulpit and believed his daughter would eventually come to her senses. As for her romance, Ann’s father knew that Mitt was heading to California for college while Ann still had two years of high school left. So how serious could they be?
They were serious. One night, Mitt went to pick up Ann for the prom, driving his “goofy-looking” AMC Marlin, a two-door fastback with a sloping roof. After they had been at the festivities for a while, he nervously took his sixteen-year-old girlfriend aside and asked—informally—if she would one day marry him. Yes, Ann said. It was a tentative yes, with the couple knowing they would soon part ways as Mitt headed to college. Years later they would remember the moment not just for the romance but for also the hilarity. Mitt, the car guy, had forgotten to gas up. He blamed it on nerves. The Marlin puttered to a halt as he drove Ann home. Somehow, Mitt and the exquisitely outfitted woman he had just asked to be his wife made it home.
From Mitt’s perspective, their path was set. But there had been a lingering, critical question. On one of their earliest dates, Mitt had leaned in for a kiss, but Ann had other ideas.
“What,” she asked, “do Mormons believe?”
Mitt was suddenly uneasy. He knew his religion made him something of an outsider. He didn’t want Ann to consider changing religions just because of him. It had to be from her heart. Now here he was on a date with one of the prettiest girls on campus, someone he knew came from mainline Protestant stock, and she was asking for a tutorial on the Mormon Church?
“I was not in the mood to talk about religion,” he would say later. “I was much more interested in physical expressions of love.”
Mitt looked Ann in the eyes and tried to answer her question. He turned to the church’s “Articles of Faith,” propounded by church founder Joseph Smith and typically memorized by followers. Mitt began by quoting the first article. “We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.” When he finished, he noticed that Ann had started to cry.
There was, of course, much more to explain, much more to the story of this little-known faith. It was a story in which the Romney family itself was deeply intertwined, from the early days of the religion’s founding to the modern era, when the Romneys held leadership positions within the church. It was a story of scripture and revelation but also of polygamy, an early Mormon practice in which Romne
ys had played a pivotal role, and of a harrowing westward journey that tested the hardiest settlers. The story of the faith, it turned out, was in many ways the story of the Romneys. It had begun in an English village more than a century earlier, when Mitt’s great-great-grandfather heard an astonishing tale from an American visitor who insisted he was a saint.
[ Two ]
Following the Call
Brother Miles, I want you to take another wife.
—BRIGHAM YOUNG TO MITT ROMNEY’S GREAT-GRANDFATHER IN 1867
“I believe in my Mormon faith, and I endeavor to live by it. My faith is the faith of my fathers,” Romney said at a moment of grave political peril during his 2008 presidential campaign, a time when he was caught between the need to cultivate the support of Christian evangelicals and the reality that many people viewed Mormonism with skepticism or hostility. “I will be true to them and to my beliefs,” Romney continued. “Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it.”
Forty-two years after Romney’s earnest attempt to explain his faith to the girl he wanted to marry, and almost two hundred years after the religion he professed was born, it was still necessary to explain and justify Mormonism to Americans, or at least to some Americans. Romney, when he entered public life, had long—probably too long—avoided the need to make that case before bowing to the necessity. And the case he made was as general as it was sincere, as if to dip into the core controversy over Mormon beliefs and early practices would only be kindling for further bigotry—as indeed, it might well be. To many people the Mormon story still sounds strange or is simply unknown; even less well known outside the church is the central place of the Romney family in that story.
One reason for that disconnect is that Mitt rarely talked about the special legacy of his ancestors. It is something he has held close, in a deeply private place. But the pride in his standing as one of Mormonism’s first families is plainly there, a fact that was obvious to any visitor to Romney’s home in Belmont, Massachusetts. In the foyer he had mounted framed portraits of five leading Mormon men, all Romneys, all figures who bear introduction if one is to reach into the elusive core of Mitt Romney.
The first face on the wall—long, lean, high-browed—was Miles A. Romney, the man who brought the name to America, the earliest among them to hear the call.
The boomtown of Nauvoo, Illinois, rose along a horseshoe bend on the Mississippi River, spreading across the muddy flats and up onto the bluffs, just as its founder had prophesied. By 1841, wagons overburdened with immigrants and their worldly goods rattled down the bustling streets, a great white temple was being constructed on a grassy hillock, and ships filled with still more newcomers pulled into the river dock. The settlers had come with a common goal: to build a haven for believers in a growing new religion, with new saints, new gospels, and a new story of Jesus, called Mormonism. Onto this scene arrived a nearly destitute family with the name of Romney. They came from the quiet village of Lower Penwortham, near Liverpool, England. For years, Romneys had been moving out and on; one named George Romney had gone to London and become a celebrated eighteenth-century portrait painter. But most were of modest means. Such was the case with a carpenter named Miles Archibald Romney and his wife, Elizabeth. One day in 1837, the couple heard a group of Mormon missionaries preach at a town square. The Romneys were so taken with the message that they became one of the first families in Great Britain to convert.
Four years after that first encounter, Miles and Elizabeth had become such fervent believers that they risked everything, emigrated to the United States, and made their way, as instructed, to Nauvoo with as many as five children. They had little money and only a vague idea of what awaited them there, following a prophet’s call. They soon learned of a small stone house that stood in the north end of Nauvoo and, according to family lore, took possession of it in exchange for a paisley shawl.
The Mormon leaders, meanwhile, were overjoyed when they learned that Miles was an expert in carpentry and construction, and they gave him one of the most important jobs in the city, naming him “master mechanic” in the building of the temple. Soon another Romney child was on the way. He would be named Miles Park Romney, and it is this son, known to all as “Miles P.,” who would play a pivotal role in the faith—and later be known as the great-grandfather of Mitt Romney. The journey of the Romneys in America, and the trials of their faith, would unfold largely through his eyes. His was the second portrait in the line on Mitt Romney’s wall.
Nauvoo was in great tumult when, two years after the Romneys arrived, Miles was born on August 18, 1843. The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, had chosen Nauvoo four years earlier as a haven for the faithful after they had been expelled from other areas. But even as the faith grew, so did attacks against it. The story of Mormonism’s beginning came from Smith, who had been born in Vermont and had moved to New York, where he had worked on farms and searched for treasure. He said he had been praying in the woods in 1820 when he saw “a pillar of light exactly over my head.” He said that two “personages” had appeared before him, telling him that other sects “were all wrong” and putting him on a path toward restoring what he regarded as the true Christian faith. Smith said an angel named Moroni had later led him to find golden plates in western New York that he translated into the Book of Mormon, describing how Christ had come to America and how Native Americans were descended from the lost tribe of Israel. This, Smith told his followers, was the true and restored Christian faith. While living in Nauvoo, Smith took multiple wives, a practice some in the faith said was a “divine pronouncement” and a restoration of a practice common in early biblical times. Some historians would later calculate that Smith had taken at least several dozen wives.
Smith’s declaration that other religions were wrong and the fears of some that he would lead a regime of theocratic “despotism” had fueled anger among non-Mormons in the region. His call for a new religious order had led to a chain reaction of violence and exodus; his flock had been kicked out of Ohio and Missouri; and he now talked of making Nauvoo a quasi-independent state. He railed against traditional Christian faiths, Illinois authorities, and the federal government and even declared he was seeking the U.S. presidency. Smith’s gift for oratory had attracted thousands but also repelled nonbelievers. Mobs gathered regularly to attack Mormons.
Then a local newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, printed accusations that Smith was a tyrant and polygamist. “We are earnestly seeking to explode the vicious principles of Joseph Smith, and those who practice the same abominations and whoredoms,” the newspaper said. Tensions rose, and a series of complaints were made against Smith, who was also the mayor of Nauvoo. The Nauvoo City Council, acting at Smith’s behest, voted that the newspaper’s printing press be destroyed. The town marshal and his men dragged the Expositor’s press into the street and pounded it with sledgehammers. Smith was arrested on charges that he had incited a riot. Imprisoned in the summer of 1844 in the nearby town of Carthage, Smith was shot and killed by a mob that stormed the jail; he was dead at age thirty-eight, two decades after receiving what he declared to be a mandate from God.
Members of the faith began to flee Nauvoo, but the Romney family stayed behind, partly to enable the senior Romney to finish his work on the temple. The temple was barely completed when mobs forced Mormons from the city at the “point of a bayonet.” Vandals soon set the temple on fire, destroying the elder Romney’s years of patient craftsmanship. Nauvoo was a sanctuary no longer, and some twenty thousand Mormons deserted a city that had briefly rivaled Chicago in population. The Romney family was too poor to follow the main group of settlers to what Mormon leaders said was the new promised land, later known as Utah. Instead, the Romneys fled to Burlington, Iowa, and then to St. Louis, Missouri. They became part of a wayward band, moving from camp to camp, with few provisions and many sick and malnourished Mormons in need of care. It would be four years before the family had enough money to load an ox-d
rawn wagon for the westward trek.
Miles P. Romney was seven years old as he made the harrowing journey of 1,300 miles. He traveled over rough trails in often frigid weather under the threat of attack by anti-Mormon mobs, Indians, and wild animals. The Romneys passed through Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming, traveling by pioneer trail landmarks such as the hulking mass of Independence Rock and the massive pillars of Devil’s Gate on the Sweetwater River. Finally, the Romneys descended through Echo Canyon and Emigration Canyon and beheld the Great Salt Lake Valley. In the shadow of the jagged peaks of the Wasatch Range, the valley spread for miles, vast stretches of arid land intersected by creeks and streams, reaching to the 1,700 square miles of the Great Salt Lake. After this journey across the plains, mountains, canyons, and basins, the Romneys settled in Salt Lake City and initially lived in a wagon just like the one in which they had traveled. And the elder Romney soon had a new task for his tools and hands: he began work on the city’s new temple. At last the family began to scrape together a decent living.
Ringed by mountains and remote from other population centers, Salt Lake City seemed like a sanctuary where the outcast Mormons could securely thrive. But as Miles entered his teenage years, the Mormons faced a new threat. In 1856, the Republican Party platform denounced polygamy and slavery as the “twin relics of barbarism.” The following year, amid concerns in Washington that Mormons put their church doctrine above loyalty to the federal government, the U.S. Army was sent to Utah to quell Mormons and ensure federal control of the territory. Miles, fourteen years old, scrambled to join the fight, but he was ordered to remain in Salt Lake City while his older brother George joined the Mormon brigade of perhaps two thousand men in nearby Echo Canyon. The conflict turned into a series of standoffs, and the federal troops eventually retreated, losing a number of soldiers to desertion.
The Real Romney Page 4
