The Manifesto, which renounced polygamy, was a cry of "uncle!" dragged from a reluctant church by a morally outraged American government. For the Mormons it had been a near-bankrupting bet on a doctrine they held to be divine.

And with that, the church quickly became earnestly monogamist.

Well, maybe not so quickly.

The shift from polygamy was wrenching and would take the better part of three decades to settle.

For example, consider that the last polygamous president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints died in May 1945. (Not counting presidents who remarried after the death of a spouse and technically are sealed to two women in the afterlife.)

Heber J. Grant married three women before 1890, one of whom survived him and died in 1952.

In later years, it was put out that Grant annulled two of his marriages on the issuance of the Manifesto.

Well, not quite. In 1901, he took one wife with him on a mission to Japan. In 1903, he was accompanied by another on his next assignment to the British Mission.

Despite the Manifesto, America was slow to embrace the Mormons. There was lingering suspicion that the Saints weren't keeping their side of the bargain.

There was the problem of polygamist relationships entered into before 1890. Technically, these marriages were frauds in the eyes of the government. Grant was dragged before a court and fined for "cohabitation" in 1899.

But what really got the gentiles' goat was news that new polygamous relationships were still being formalized, possibly under church sanction.

It is indisputable that some church officials performed plural marriages after the 1890 Manifesto. Whether these men were acting as rogue prelates is a matter of debate.

In early 1904, The U.S. Senate opened hearings into whether the church was cheating on its pledge to forsake polygamy. President Joseph F. Smith endured the indignity of being summoned to Washington and questioned for three days in March by secular authorities.

The next month, at general conference, Smith issued what is called "The Second Manifesto." It reasserted that the church frowned on polygamy, and that this time it really, really meant it.

But there were hardliners who believed it was OK to lie to the enemy in time of war. The U.S. government was waging war on the laws of God, they believed. Apostles John W. Taylor and Mathias Cowley were found by a church court to have taken wives after 1890.

The fact that newly minted apostle David O. McKay was genuinely shocked and outraged when Taylor hinted that the marriages had been condoned on the sly by Smith, points to a real shift in attitudes between the old guard and the rising generation in church leadership.

Taylor remained unrepentant and was excommunicated in 1911. He died in 1916. A son and namesake from one of his six marriages, by the way, wrote the short stories that were turned by Disney into "The Absent-minded Professor," "Flubber" and "Son of Flubber."

In 1965 McKay, by then president of the LDS Church, posthumously restored Taylor's membership.

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* PAT BAGLEY is the editorial cartoonist for The Salt Lake Tribune. He is the co-author of This Is the Place: A Crossroads of Utah's Past, along with his brother, Will Bagley.