Theodore Roosevelt and Reed Smoot

DURING AN INTERVIEW with Apostle Reed Smoot in September, 1939, this writer asked the distinguished churchman-politician: Who was the greatest statesman whom you met in your thirty-year career as Utah's Senator? Roosevelt, Smoot replied without hesitation or equivocation. To an interviewer who had some knowledge of Smoot's political orthodoxy and of his strenuous efforts to defeat the rebel Roosevelt in the 1912 Republican national convention, as well as his intransigent attitude toward the Rough Rider in 1916, the answer was startling. Coolidge, Hoover, Root, or Aldrich would have seemed natural choices, but one did not expect the ebullient political gladiator of Oyster Bay to be named by a standpatter of Smoot's caliber. The Apostle-Senator was, as always, entirely serious. In Smcot's eyes, Roosevelt had largely redeemed the heresy of 1912 by his support of Hughes in 1916, his bitter denunciation of Wilson, his consistent support of the party of righteousness thereafter, and his apparent willingness to lead the Republicans to victory in 1920. But it was not thi record of repentance and atonement that accounted for the judgment. It was the period of Roosevelt's presidency that won the tribute. These were the years of Smoot's personal travail. By 1940, even the resplendent era when Smoot held the chairmanship of the mighty Finance Committee, even the stern struggle to achieve the Smoot-Hawley tariff, were definitely less significant for Smoot than the memory of his first term, when he fought to hold his place in the United States Senate. After four harrowing years, 1903-1907, victory had finally come. Reed Smoot was vindicated. Theodore Roosevelt was the man who made that result possible. One may doubt that the preservation of Smoot was an act of high statesmanship; but, to the Senator, it was not only Smoot who was saved, but also the Mormon Church. He always regarded the attempt to unseat him as an attack on the Church. Consequently his personal victory, while important, was secondary to the defeat of the Church's enemies. In his opinion, when Smoot won, the Mormon Church also won. Any politician who aided and protected the Church was, ipso facto, a statesman. Smoot proceeded to elaborate upon his debt to Roosevelt. The President had stood like a Gibraltar against the expulsion or exclusion of Smoot. His influence had been decisive in persuading certain Republican members of the Committee on Privileges and Elections, which heard the case for and against the fledgling Senator, to speak and vote for his

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