The Reed Smoot Hearings: The Investigation of a Mormon Senator and the Transformation of an American Religion. Edited by Michael Harold Paulos and Konden Smith Hansen. The Saints and the State: The Mormon Troubles in Illinois. By James Simeone

Abstract

It has for a long time been a standard trope in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to emphasize that the forty years or so overlapping the turn of the twentieth century were a time of “transition” or “assimilation.” A church that had, in the half-century preceding, grown resistant to popular American norms about marriage, the marketplace, and democratic government began to embrace those ideas, and even to—in the case of monogamy—make them central to their faith’s identity. In 1890, the Church officially abandoned polygamy; the next year, church leaders encouraged the disbanding of the People’s Party, the church-backed political party that dominated politics in the Utah territory, and encouraged church members to join the national political parties; in the last two or three decades of the nineteenth century, it surrendered its attempts to formulate economic communalism and separation from the national market economy. Historians...