Review: Michael Harold Paulos and Konden Smith Hansen, eds. The Reed Smoot Hearings: The Investigation of a Mormon Senator and the Transformation of an American Religion. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2021.

Authors

Carter Charles

Keywords

Reed Smoot, Latter-day Saints, US religious history

Abstract

Before the clean-shaven and impeccably dressed David Oman McKay, it was Reed Owen Smoot who embodied Latter-day Saints as modern, mainstream, and American. The Reed Smoot Hearings remind us of this pivotal role that Smoot and others, like Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints president Joseph F. Smith, senators Fred E. Dubois and Albert J. Beveridge, and US president Theodore Roosevelt played in both Latter-day Saint and US religious history. The book is a welcome addition to works by Milton Merrill, Harvard Heath, and Kathleen Flake. Michael Harold Paulos and Konden Hansen Smith, editors as well as authors, are established contributors to the scholarship on Reed Smoot: Paulos authored several review articles and eventually published a transcript of the Smoot hearings; Smith Hansen, winner of the Best First Book award of the Mormon History Association (2019), also contributed to the scholarship on Smoot prior to this volume.

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

Charles, Carter (2023) "Review: Michael Harold Paulos and Konden Smith Hansen, eds. The Reed Smoot Hearings: The Investigation of a Mormon Senator and the Transformation of an American Religion. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2021.," Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 10: No. 1, Article 23.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol10/iss1/23