"The Smoot hearings are important not only to the study of Mormonism, but also the nation's interpretation of the First Amendment. Making significant portions of the hearings' 3,500-page transcript available for the first time and including rich but unobtrusive annotation, this volume should be welcomed by scholars and the general reader alike, both of whom will find the hearings as interesting and amusing as they are important." —Kathleen Flake, Professor of American Religious History, Vanderbilt University Divinity School; author of The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle

“Reed Smoot has long been a hero of mine, and I appreciate this thorough, detailed collection of his early experiences in the U.S. Senate. With Latter-day Saints more prominent in government today than ever before, it is noteworthy how this book chronicles the way Senator Smoot challenged and overcame the anti-Mormon prejudices of his day to represent Utah in Congress.” —U.S. Senator Orrin G. Hatch

Association for Mormon Letters, Jeffrey Needle
The 2008 Presidential campaign is in full swing. Democrats can't decide between Hillary and Barack; Republicans are up in the air about Rudy's honesty and likeableness, and still wonder about Mitt's Mormonism. This will be an exciting year, no? Someone will be sitting in the Oval Office in 2009. Will Mitt Mormon go to Washington? (Apologies to Jimmy Stewart ...) Who knows?

Ask any Latter-day Saint about Mormons running for President, and I'll guess few will remember that Joseph Smith, Jr., launched such a campaign in 1844, the year of his death. And even before Joseph's run, Mormons had had an interesting relationship with civil government and with those who hold the power to guide our nation.

It is often helpful to gain the perspective of history, a view of how LDS candidates, and even elected officials, have been treated by the majority who neither understand, nor sympathize with, the complex system known as Mormonism. With this volume, we are given a solid opportunity to gain this perspective.

When Reed Smoot was elected to national office in the early 1900's, there was an uproar in Congress. They didn't want to seat the Senator-elect -- a rare event in the halls of the U.S. Senate. The reason? Smoot was an apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

A glimpse at a timeline of Mormon history will make some of this a bit clearer. Polygamy, a practice that was "abandoned" in 1890, was, as we all know, quietly continued until the mid 1910's when it was definitively abandoned by the Church. Although Smoot had not practiced plural marriage, there remained a distrust of Mormonism among many Americans. Members of the Church had not fully assimilated into American society as yet.

What followed was a series of hearings and, in the view of some, inquisitions, spanning the years 1904-1906. Transcripts of the hearings, more than 3,500 pages in length, document this extraordinary event in American, and Mormon, history. Many of Mormonism's brightest lights were put on the witness stand and grilled about Mormonism's eccentric (in their view) ideas and practices.

Paulos has condensed this record into about 700 pages of transcripts from the hearings. Included are testimonies from Joseph F. Smith, B. H. Roberts, and many others. Point for point, item for item, leaders of the Church defended, as best they could, the beliefs, and the very existence, of the Church they loved and served.

I will admit that I haven't read every word of this book. One can scan from page to page and latch on to discussions of interest to the reader. Without meaning any disrespect, I found Joseph F. Smith to be, well, Clintonian in some respects. Yes, the questions were sometimes leading, and often assumed a response that was not forthcoming. But it seems that leaders of the Church fully understood how sensitive these hearings were--how the outcome of these exchanges would affect not just Senator Smoot's election, but also how the rest of the nation would come to understand an emerging American religion.

The exchange with George Reynolds, who you will remember was imprisoned for a short time for his practice of plural marriage, is a fascinating example of how Americans viewed the 1890 Manifesto, and how some members of the Church, immersed in Plural Marriage, managed to play dodge ball with the law. Reynolds is best known for his involvement in polygamy persecution. Others were involved only tangentially, as believing members of the Church. But the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections, the body conducting the hearings, was determined to place not just Reed Smoot, but the entire Mormon hierarchy, on trial.

(I was disappointed that the editor neglected to list the religious affiliations of the members of this Committee. I would have enjoyed knowing their various heritages.)

The editor begins each section with a quote from media covering the hearings. It was interesting to get the point of view, say, of the Deseret News, as the hearings progressed. The transcripts are also abundantly footnoted to enhance the reading and fill in details of the story.

Also included are 14 pages of photos, including some of the wonderful editorial cartoons of the era. I will admit to being a real softie when it comes to these drawings. They say so much about the subject of the satire, and gives a sense of the times that mere words can never offer.

One can hardly miss the fact that Mitt Romney has been subjected to the same kinds of questioning that have faced nearly every Mormon candidate for public office. One member of the press actually asked Mitt if he believed the Garden of Eden was in Missouri! I don't know how Romney could have responded to this. He should have known that such questions would be coming.

But this book isn't about Mitt Romney, and in many ways, it isn't much about Reed Smoot. The apostle seems to melt into the background of the larger agenda of the Senate Committee--a dissection of the Mormon religion, a broad unease about seating a man whose religion had long been an isolated and, in some minds, an anti-American cult--as it grinds its way through the process.

There is much to be profited from reading this book. A hefty price-tag may discourage some. But, in the end, one does not judge a book by its poundage or its typestyle. Instead, we must look at the permanence of its importance, the thoroughness of its treatment of its topic. "The Mormon Church on Trial" passes all these tests.

Please consider obtaining this book when it is released. We cannot undervalue the use of history in understanding the present. And, amazingly, 100 years later, the questions asked of the witnesses sound amazingly like what Romney is being asked today. Perhaps someone will do Mitt a favor and send him a copy.

As president, he said, he would "put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law."

Salt Lake City Weekly, Dallas Robbins
After Mitt Romney dropped out of the presidential race, many people gave a sigh of relief that we would not have to possibly endure years of Mormon jokes delivered on late night television. But a century earlier, Reed Smoot--an LDS Apostle who was elected to the U. S. Senate--caused an even greater media controversy. Congress refused to let Smoot take his seat--because, as everyone knew, Mormons were weird. Soon after, Congress did what they do best: held hearings to determine how weird they really were.

The Mormon Church on Trial: Transcripts of the Reed Smoot Hearings is the first scholarly examination of this moment in American history. Testimonies by LDS leaders were brought before Congress, ultimately uncovering skeletons in the LDS Church and Utah politics.

The major skeleton exposed was the continued practice of polygamy, 14 years after it “officially” ended in 1890. So Congress did what they do even better, investigate people’s “sexual relations,” because, as everyone knew, a man having sex with more than one woman was weird. These revelations resulted in the church’s stronger policy against polygamists, including two apostles who “resigned” and were later disciplined.

Michael Harold Paulos’s edited transcripts explore a watershed moment in national politics when the LDS Church finally gave up part of its 19th-century identity and was brought kicking and screaming into the modern age.

Deseret News, Dennis Lythgoe
When Reed Smoot, an LDS apostle, was elected to the U. S. Senate as a Republican from Utah in 1903, he immediately fell into a quagmire. After, when another Mormon, B. H. Roberts, had been chosen for Congress in 1899, the political uproar was so great that he was denied his seat.

But there was an important difference: Roberts was a polygamist while Smoot was a monogamist, and the issue that surrounded each man was allegedly that of polygamy. Even though Utah Mormons today lean toward the Republican Party, the Republicans in Smoot’s day were dead set against “the twin relics, slavery and polygamy.”

The result was a long and bruising hearing led by Senate Republicans to expose Smoot as a secret polygamist, and thus send him home on the coattails of Roberts. The Senate failed in its carefully orchestrated effort, and Reed Smoot not only survived politically, he was a very powerful senator for 30 years.

For anyone attracted to Mormon history, the Smoot hearings represented a gold mine of testimony--42 witnesses in 17 days--for and against his admission to the Senate. The documentation of the hearings has always seemed insurmountable with 3,432 pages recorded. Yet Michael Paulos, a young financial analyst who maintains a vigorous side interest in history, has produced a condensation that is slightly more than 700 pages.

His book, The Mormon Church on Trial: Transcripts of the Reed Smoot Hearings, is not only carefully edited but deftly annotated, making this historic, political, and religious episode accessible and fascinating to the general public. Even as a BYU student, Paulos had become enamored of the Smoot hearings, although he found it difficult to understand them either from written history or from college classes.

So in 2001, he began his own research into the Smoot case, reading up on its background and collecting his own copy of the transcripts, working most evenings and Saturdays. “I’m a political junkie, and I love Mormon history,” said Paulos during a phone interview from his home in San Antonio, “so the Smoot case seemed the perfect intersection of both. I was fascinated.”

He found that the testimonies of Reed Smoot, LDS President Joseph F. Smith and Apostle James E. Talmage propelled Mormonism into the public square much as Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy did for modern Mormonism. “Smoot is part one, Romney is par two,” Paulos said. The parallels between Smoot and Romney are pure serendipity.”

Paulos found reading the transcripts of the hearings to be “tedious and painstaking” but his business acumen allowed him to use comfortably 25 spreadsheets to keep it all straight. “The biggest challenge,” Paulos said, “was to get it from hard copy to electronic text. I had to be careful to catch all the mistakes. I didn’t want my work to be merely an abridgement of the hearings. I wanted to provide ‘behind-the-scenes information,’ and it worked out very well.”

Family and friendship connections facilitated Paulos’s acquisition of materials from both the Smoot and Badger families. Carl Badger was private secretary to Smoot during the hearings, and he kept a very helpful journal. Paulos was able to get primary documents directly from the Badger family.

Paulos discovered that Smoot was “a savvy businessman even before he was a politician,” but his “lack of religious knowledge was surprising and not what you’d expect of a general authority. On the stand, he testified he had been through the temple only once, and it didn’t make much of an impact on him.”

That was important since several senators had heard that Mormons took secret oaths, perhaps against the government of the United States, inside the temple. Because Smoot had been an apostle only three years, President Smith and Talmage filled in the gaps of his LDS knowledge.

Paulos said Smith was “the most influential witness” while Talmage was “the smartest, most intellectual witness. He talked about the minutia of doctrines.”

When Smith seemed to indicate that the process of revelation was rare to him personally, it surprised many people. Paulos believes that Smith “was a cagey witness and played the political game when he testified, using spin” as politicians do.

“A lot of the senators who voted in favor of Smoot said the hearings were ridiculous,” Paulos said, “because ‘we were examining the Mormon Church rather than Smoot.’”

Actually, Smoot’s “wet-behind-the-ears” image might have helped him win his case, and there was no evidence that he had ever advocated or practiced polygamy. In Paulos’s view, the politicians failed to find “their smoking gun.”

Paulos has provided a fine historical treatise on one of the most interesting episodes in both Mormon history and American political history. His book is invaluable for understanding Mormons as they emerged as a stable force in the 19th century.

For months, he vacillated over whether to give the speech or not, and when he sought advice, he received conflicting opinions.

The man was Reed Smoot and, a little over 100 years ago, he stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate to defend his right to serve there as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Smoot gave what historian Michael H. Paulos describes as a "JFK speech before JFK gave it," a 30-minute address that passionately refuted claims against him, the LDS Church and "unequivocally pledged" allegiance in "civil affairs to my country."

Smoot delivered, in other words, a speech that prefigured the one presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave this morning in Texas.

Smoot spoke a day before the Senate voted on whether to let him retain his seat, culminating two years of hearings on his fitness to serve that proved tumultuous and painful for Smoot and for the LDS Church.

Now, as Romney faces similar questions about his faith, there is renewed interest in Smoot's experience, which is recast by Paulos in a newly edited transcript of the 1907 Senate hearings.

The Mormon Church on Trial: Transcripts of the Reed Smoot Hearings will be published Jan. 25 by Signature Books. Paulos has whittled the 3,432 pages generated during the hearings, held from 1904 to 1906, into a still hefty tome of 744 pages.

Paulos' treatment makes the record more accessible, using extensive footnotes that draw on journals, letters and recent research to provide valuable clarifications and context.

In Smoot's day, the fervor and anti-Mormon sentiment was "stronger and more acceptable," Paulos said.

But that the "Mormon question" has been renewed at all with Romney at its vortex disturbs some historians.

"The questions concerning Romney's religion are doctrinal and we have traditionally taken a position that creedal beliefs were not a basis for judging political opportunity," said Kathleen Flake, a Vanderbilt University historian and author of The Politics of American Religious Identify: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle. "This is not a proud moment in our process."

Today, 16 LDS Church members serve in Congress - four Democrats and 12 Republicans.

Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, is not the first Mormon to make a presidential bid, but he has the momentum of a contender, which is perhaps why he has drawn a level of scrutiny others escaped.

Still, Smoot was the man who paved their political paths.

The Utah Legislature elected Smoot to the Senate in 1903, three years after he was ordained an apostle in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Complaints were filed immediately by the Salt Lake Ministerial Association.

The Protestant group alleged - incorrectly - that Smoot was a polygamist and condoned the practice; had taken an oath against the U.S. in temple ceremony; and would take direction from LDS leaders.

The Senate let Smoot take his seat but launched an investigation.

Paulos said that while Smoot was at the center of the hearings, the real focus was the LDS Church itself and each day, "shocking" new revelations emerged about the controversial faith.

Then LDS Church President Joseph F. Smith, called as a witness on the hearing's opening day, was the touchstone for much of the sensational coverage that followed. Smith was at times evasive as senators grilled him about statehood, politics, business relations and church practice and belief - including polygamy, which the church had disavowed in 1890 as a condition of statehood.

The Smoot hearings were "essentially a tribunal on the Mormon church and an opportunity for senators in the country to take a closer look at whether the church had kept its word when Utah became a state and [whether] it was legitimate," Paulos said. "The answer, effectively, was yes."

Historian Harvard Heath, in the book's introduction, said Smoot was caught between "trying not to offend the enemy and not embarrass or criticize his church."

He succeeded, Heath said, by projecting the image of a "new kind of Mormon - monogamous, business-oriented, civic-minded" and free from the older generation's world view.

Smoot's speech, which is not included in the new book, was key in that campaign. Paulos said Smoot "cogently" rebutted claims against him and the church, while describing the need to let existing plural families fade away. He was vehement in his opposition to the practice.

Smoot denied that the faith's endowment ceremonies contained any "act of hostility" toward the government. And he gave a passionate defense of Mormons as loyal patriots, describing their contributions on battlefields from the Spanish American War to the Philippines.

"And so far as I am concerned, I formally and solemnly aver that in every vote and action as United States Senator I shall be governed in the future, as I have been in the past, only by my convictions of what is best for the whole people of the United States, under my oath to support the Constitution and laws of this nation," Smoot said. "I owe no allegiance to any church or other organization which in any way interferes with my supreme allegiance in civil affairs to my country - an allegiance which I freely, fully and gladly give."

A day later, the vote to unseat Smoot failed and he and the LDS Church had won "political legitimacy," though not "social and cultural acceptance," Heath writes.

Romney echoed Smoot on Thursday, telling his audience: "Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions," Romney said. "Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin."

As president, he said, he would "put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law."