Joseph White Musser

"On March 21, 1921, Joseph White Musser (1872-1954) was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) because he refused to give up the practice of plural marriage out of devotion to the religion's foundational texts. Until his excommunication, Musser had been a leader in the Church. He served a mission in Alabama, was called to the 16th Quorum of the Seventy, received his Second Anointing alongside his first wife at the young age of 27, and served as a high councilor in the Uintah Wasatch and Granite Stakes. But when the Church released the Second Manifesto, ending new plural marriages in the United States, Musser continued performing these marriages, and indeed continued marrying, which demonstrated that changes within the institutional Church were not always universally received. However, Musser's leadership did not end with his excommunication, and the former LDS leader become one of the most forceful thinkers and Prophets in the fundamentalist movement. He was ordained an Apostle by Lorin C. Woolley in the Council of Friends, a group in the emerging Mormon fundamentalist movement. The fundamentalists proved to be as heterogeneous a group as the mainstream LDS Church, as the Council of Friends fractured into multiple groups upon Musser's death. Musser's story is then simultaneously the story of the birth of a new Mormon movement, a crisis in another Mormon movement, and the ways in which the one survived through adaptation while the other survived through resistance and preservation of the past. A significant Priesthood leader who codified and expanded many of the foundational teachings in modern Mormon fundamentalism, Musser was a foundational Mormon thinker whose intellectual work translates into the lived experience of his contemporary followers"--