The Reed Smoot Hearings

A book on Mormon and American relations during the Progressive Era has the feeling of coming into the middle of a movie. The federal government outlawed polygamy in Utah in 1862, and in 1887 confiscated the property of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Lds) as punishment for persisting in the institution called plural marriage. After the death of Lds president John Taylor and an 1890 referendum in Utah Territory renouncing the practice, an opening for change appeared. A decade-long process of rapprochement culminated in hearings over four years (1904–1907), which would eventuate in seating Reed Smoot, a monogamous Mormon and member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles who had been elected to the Senate by the new state of Utah. Putting power politics aside, this new collection of essays focuses on how the hearings negotiated a new, subtler form of religious politics “permanently altering the Church toward more Protestant sensibilities of private faith” (p. 59

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