Were USA states really this disconnected in 1964, and was bigamy really punished by death?

Question

I've just watched the The Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode Three Wives Too Many from 1964.

In it, a man has a wife in four different USA states, traveling between them constantly and keeping them secret from one another. Apparently, the punishment was extremely harsh -- death, even?! -- for "bigamy", so he's very scared of this becoming revealed.

Yet he is legally married to four different females.

How is this possible? How can there not have been some sort of central authority keeping track of this, especially if it's not only illegal but an extremely serious crime? Were the different (even nearby) USA "states" so extremely detached as to not share this kind of basic information?

Maybe it's only silly TV nonsense, but they make it seem like the different states are almost like different parallel worlds. I may also have misunderstood the part where one of the wives threatens him with revealing the whole setup, but she seems to suggest that he will be executed for bigamy.

Answer 1

I'm thirding the "very plausible" on the disconnect.

Something to keep in mind is that the US is big. Really big.

It's one of the top things people who aren't familiar with the US just don't grasp. The time to drive from Los Angeles, California to New York City, New York is only about 25 minutes less than the drive from Lisbon, Portugal to Moscow. The time it takes you to drive through multiple countries in Europe won't even get you out of some of our states. You could dedicate an entire day to your cross country trip just getting between El Paso, Texas and Houston, Texas. While there are a few small states, the end result is that most states are disconnected, in the sense that you mean, just by virtue of distance alone. The reasons mentioned in the other answers--fiercely independent states with all of these records administered locally, and lack of substantive computer database technology for several more decades--reinforces this. But physical disconnection is itself a powerful force here, and has long contributed to significant differences in culture and law between states. Not quite the cultural and legal disparity between, say, Spain and Russia, but enough to be noticeable.

For example, Ted Bundy went on a seven state killing spree in the mid 1970's, racking up 20 confirmed and 30 confessed murders, assisted by his knowledge that states rarely ever communicated information about murders and missing persons to each other. When he was at last arrested for good in Florida, it took a lot of time for authorities to even know who they had on their hands and the severity of his crimes, due to this lack of sharing (and his using a false name; which they figured out was false fairly quickly, but that still didn't tell them his real name). These killings helped to spur states to create better information sharing agreements and cooperation with Federal authorities, but point being: even murder wasn't something states felt was worth keeping other states informed of as late as the 70's.

Answer 2

Were USA states really this disconnected in 1964

Yes.

Indeed they still are quite disconnected by the standards of other federated nations. US states have always jealousy guarded their autonomy. Marriage has always been a state responsibility and, in some states, the responsibility is passed onto local government. Even today there is no national register of marriages and there may not even be statewide ones.

Notwithstanding, in 1964, marriage records were not computerised. The only record of your marriage was a piece of paper in a filing cabinet. If there are 4 pieces of paper in 4 different filing cabinets in 4 different states (or counties), how would anybody know?

Was bigamy really punished by death?

The United States, due to the presence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has had more experience with polygamy than most western nations. However, it has never been punishable by death.

Answer 3

Yes, the Disconnect is Plausible

The US has always been quite localized in the collection and retention of vital statistics. Even today there is no central repository or database of such information; when federal officials require proof of identity they ask for a state document certified by a state or local authority. Many birth certificates even now are certified by a local county or municipal clerk, not a state official, and there may be no state-wide database of births.

For marriages, I recently had to provide a marriage certificate to a federal authority. They wanted an original document, certified by the local authority. There was and is certainly no US-wide database of marriages to consult. In 1964, I very much doubt whether there would have been any state-wide files, and even if there were, how would they be compared? Neither the SSN nor any other nation-wide identifier was routinely used on a marriage record at that time, and names are far from unique. Even if there had been some sort of national file of marriages, there would have been no practical way to determine whether a person seeking to enter into a marriage had previously married in some other state, even under the same name, let alone under a different name. One would have to know first the locality, names, and approximate date of a possible previous marriage to be able to do a records search to confirm it.

The traditional common-law way of preventing plural marriage was “posting the banns”, that is, announcing in church a planned marriage for each of several weekly services prior to the date scheduled for the marriage. This worked when most people did not move around much, and an attendee would likely know of any previous marriage. Even in the middle ages, such people as merchants, peddlers, and traveling laborers were not detected by this system if they entered into a bigamous marriage.

I will have to check on the possible penalty for bigamy in the 1960s. It might be that the more plausible threat was of private violence from one or another bride's relatives. A Wikipedia article says US penalties for bigamy are “up to five years in prison” but cites no source and gives no date.

Answer 4

france

How is this possible? How can there not have been some sort of central authority keeping track of this, especially if it's not only illegal but an extremely serious crime? Were the different (even nearby) USA "states" so extremely detached as to not share this kind of basic information?

Other answers and comments have focused on the technology aspect, but it is primarily an issue of government organization and legal rules, rather than one of technology.

This wouldn't have happened in France, even in the 19th century (i.e. post-French Revolution after marriage laws were standardized in the French Civil Code and in related bureaucratic centralizing reforms initiated by Napoleon). There, all of the marriage and divorce and name change records of a person are maintained at the local clerk's office of the local government in the place you were born, and there is no counterpart to the notion of "common law marriage" that exists in a few residual common law jurisdictions including a number of U.S. states.

This old fashioned paper records in a file cabinet method worked because each person had only one designated file cabinet. If you tried to get married under a false name and the local clerk's office where the person of that name purported to have been born didn't have a birth certificate for that person, the marriage would have been promptly annulled by operation of law even if no one complained, and a fraud investigation would have been commenced.

Likewise, if a French citizen got married a second time, without the proper paperwork showing that their existing marriage had been terminated by death or divorce filed with the local clerk's office in the place that they were born, the marriage would also have been annulled by government officials even if no one complained, and a bigamy prosecution would have been begun as a matter of course.

In a sense, this method of personal record keeping was even decentralized. There was no single central databased of birth, death, marriage and divorce records for most of French history, although there may be one now in very recent times developed long after WWII.

But, while the record keeping was decentralized, it was still highly coordinated in an efficient pre-modern bureaucratic system.

The Japanese family registry system of the late 19th century and beyond would have been similarly effective and efficient in a low technology era by similar means (except that polygamy wasn't prohibited there until after WWII, so this particular problem wouldn't have arisen).