“On Trial,” chapter 7 of Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days, Volume 3, Boldly, Nobly, and Independent, 1893–1955 (2022)
Chapter 7: “On Trial”
Chapter 7
On Trial
Early in 1901, Joseph F. Smith began shouldering more Church responsibilities in the First Presidency as George Q. Cannon’s health worsened. In March, George and his family went to the California coast, hoping its ocean breezes would revive him. Joseph, meanwhile, tried to rally his friend from afar.
“My lifelong associations with you in the work of the ministry,” he wrote to George, “have bound my heart, my soul, my love and sympathies to you in the cords of affection as strong as the love of life, which cannot be broken.”1
George’s health continued to decline, however. His sons sent regular reports on their father’s failing health to Salt Lake City, so Joseph was not surprised when a telegram announcing George’s death arrived on April 12. Still, he felt the loss keenly. “He was both a humble and a great man, a mighty chieftain in the councils of his brethren,” Joseph reflected in his journal that day. “All Israel will mourn his death.”2
Amid his grief, Joseph turned his attention to his expanded role in the First Presidency.3 That year, he and President Lorenzo Snow assigned three apostles to lead missionary efforts in key parts of the world. They called Francis Lyman to preside over the European Mission, John Henry Smith to revitalize the mission in Mexico, and Heber J. Grant to lead the first mission to Japan. Wanting to expand the Lord’s work to other parts of the world, Church leaders also contemplated sending missionaries to South America and constructing a small temple for the colonies of Saints in Arizona and northern Mexico. The Church was still in debt, however, and nothing immediate came of these plans.4
The Saints mourned two more deaths that year. In August, Relief Society general president Zina Young collapsed while visiting her daughter, Zina Presendia Card, in Canada. Zina Presendia rushed her mother back to Utah, where she died peacefully in her Salt Lake City home. Throughout her life, Zina had been an example of placing the kingdom of God before all else.5
“Each day makes me rejoice more in the grandeur of the principles which we believe in,” she had told the Relief Society in Cardston two weeks before her death. “The greatness of our blessings is beyond expression. There is nothing compared to the blessings we enjoy through our reliance on God.”6
Two months later, President Snow was overcome with sudden illness. Several apostles faithfully attended to him and at Joseph F. Smith’s request knelt around his bed to pray in his behalf. He passed away a short time later.
At President Snow’s funeral, Joseph eulogized him and his unwavering witness of truth. “With the exception of the prophet Joseph,” he declared, “I don’t believe any man ever stood upon this earth who bore a stronger, more clear-cut testimony of Jesus Christ.”7
A few days later, on October 17, 1901, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles sustained Joseph F. Smith as the sixth president of the Church. He called John Winder of the Presiding Bishopric and Anthon Lund to be his counselors. The apostles then laid their hands on Joseph, and John Smith, his older brother and the Church patriarch, set him apart.8
The Saints sustained the new First Presidency at a special meeting in the Salt Lake Tabernacle on November 10, 1901. “It is our duty to take hold of the work vigorously, with full determination and purpose of heart to carry it on, with the help of the Lord and in accordance with the inspiration of His Spirit,” President Smith told the congregation. With a new century dawning, he wanted to give Church members hope for the future.
“We have been driven from our homes, maligned and spoken evil of everywhere,” he said. “The Lord designs to change this condition of things and to make us known to the world in our true light—as true worshippers of God.”9
At the meeting, President Smith also called on the Saints to sustain Bathsheba Smith as the fourth general president of the Relief Society. It was the first time the priesthood quorums were asked to give their sustaining vote for a new Relief Society general presidency.
“It was very gratifying to women interested in the advancement of the sisters,” observed Emmeline Wells, “to see the uplifted hands of all the several quorums of the holy priesthood raised to sustain them.”10
Seventy-nine years old, Bathsheba was one of the few founding members of the Nauvoo Relief Society still living. After joining the Church at age fifteen, she had gathered with the Saints first in Missouri and then in Nauvoo. In 1841 she married apostle George A. Smith and later served as an ordinance worker in the Nauvoo Temple. She had been an active worker in the Relief Society, most recently as Zina Young’s second counselor in the general presidency.11
Two months after the Saints sustained her, Bathsheba issued a greeting of love and goodwill to all Relief Society members. “Dear sisters, seek to bind your society with hoops of love and union,” she declared. “Let us go forth at this hour with renewed resolutions to take up the work of relief and improvement.”12
With her counselors, Annie Hyde and Ida Dusenberry, she advocated serving the poor and needy and promoted grain storage and silk production. To raise funds for relief work, she encouraged society members to collect donations by holding bazaars, concerts, and dances. She sent delegates to national women’s organizations and helped women train to be nurses and midwives. She also began gathering funds and making plans for a “Woman’s Building” across the street from the Salt Lake Temple, on land Lorenzo Snow had set apart for the organization before his death.13
Like their predecessors, Bathsheba and her counselors believed it was important to visit with individual Relief Societies. They often relied on the wives of mission presidents to visit Relief Societies in Europe and Oceania. But they themselves or members of the Relief Society general board tried to visit Latter-day Saint women in the western United States, Mexico, and Canada at least twice a year. Because the Church had dozens of stakes in this region, making it more difficult to visit everyone, they called six additional women to assist in the work.14
During their visits to stakes, Relief Society leaders noticed a lack of interest among younger women. Because many of these women were new mothers, the general presidency encouraged stake Relief Societies to make their meetings more appealing to the younger generation. Relief Societies at this time did not follow a set curriculum, so Bathsheba instructed the stakes to design their own education classes for mothers. She asked that each Relief Society draw on the life experiences of its older members while also studying scientific books on child-rearing, which interested the new generation of women. Soon the Woman’s Exponent began publishing course outlines to help stakes develop their programs.15
In August 1903, Bathsheba sent thirty-year-old Ida Dusenberry to Cardston to help Zina Presendia Card and local Relief Society presidencies prepare mothers’ classes. Ida instructed them to take charge of the program and use Church magazines and other Church publications in their lessons.
“How far in a scientific way are we to study in our mothers’ classes?” Zina Presendia asked.
As a college-educated kindergarten teacher and school administrator, Ida was eager to infuse the mothers’ classes with the latest ideas on parenting. Yet she understood that the older Relief Society sisters had much to offer from their own experience.
“We want you to take up needs of a mother and her duty to her children in a general way,” she explained. “We may learn many good practical things from each other.”16
While Ida Dusenberry was visiting Cardston, her older brother Reed Smoot was preparing for a political battle in the United States Senate. A junior member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Reed had been elected to the Senate earlier that year after receiving the First Presidency’s permission to run.17 His wife, Allie, also supported his desire to serve in the Senate, certain he could do much for the people of Utah. “I am very anxious for you to succeed,” she told him, “and feel like God will bless us both and help us.”18
Predictably, Reed’s victory sparked outrage and protests.19 The Church had struggled to improve its public image after B. H. Roberts’s election to the House of Representatives in 1898 provoked a national backlash against the Saints. The Church had since opened a Bureau of Information on Temple Square to help people learn more about the Saints. The bureau was staffed by volunteers, many of them from the YMMIA and YLMIA, who distributed Church literature and answered questions about the Church and its beliefs. So far, they had welcomed thousands of visitors to Salt Lake City with accurate information about the Church. Yet their work did little to change the minds of the Church’s fiercest opponents in and out of Utah.20
Reed’s most aggressive critics were members of the Salt Lake Ministerial Association, a group of Protestant businessmen, lawyers, and clergymen from Utah. Shortly after the election, they formally petitioned the Senate to deny Reed his seat. Their petition claimed that the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles wielded supreme political and economic authority over the Saints and demanded absolute obedience from them. They also asserted that Church leaders still preached, practiced, and supported plural marriage, despite the Manifesto. These factors, they concluded, made the Saints undemocratic and disloyal to the nation.
The members of the Ministerial Association feared that Reed would use his position as an apostle in the Church to promote plural marriage and protect those who practiced it. One member even accused Reed, a monogamist, of practicing plural marriage in secret. He warned that Reed would be a pawn of the First Presidency, wholly subject to their direction.21
Senate leaders reviewed the petitions and appointed a committee of thirteen senators to conduct a hearing into the Ministerial Association’s claims. Yet they also permitted Reed to take his oath of office, allowing him to serve as a senator at least until the committee finished its hearing.22
Although the threat of investigation loomed over the Church, Joseph F. Smith believed that Reed should keep his apostleship and his Senate seat, confident that he could do more good in Washington than anywhere else. President Smith saw the investigation as a chance to help people better understand the Saints and their beliefs.23
Since Reed had never practiced plural marriage, he did not fret about the committee’s investigation into his personal life. But he worried about how the Church would fare during the hearing. Rumors about new plural marriages abounded in Utah, and doubts about the Church’s commitment to abandoning the practice lingered in the public mind since B. H. Roberts’s election. As a leader in the Church, Reed had to answer for Church policies. He knew the committee would investigate post-Manifesto plural marriages thoroughly. He also expected the senators to question him and other witnesses about the Church’s involvement in politics and the Saints’ loyalty to the United States.24
If the committee proved that the Church promoted lawbreaking, Reed could be stripped of his seat, and the Saints’ reputation would suffer.
On January 4, 1904, Reed submitted a rebuttal to the committee, formally denying the Ministerial Association’s accusations. He hoped to focus the committee’s attention on him and his conduct. But when he met with the committee one week later, it was clear the senators were determined to investigate the Church. And they were especially eager to question Joseph F. Smith and other general authorities about their political influence over the Saints and the continuation of plural marriage after the Manifesto.
“Senator Smoot, you are not on trial,” the committee chairman told him. “It is the Mormon church that we intend to investigate, and we are going to see that these men obey law.”25
On February 25, 1904, the Senate committee subpoenaed Joseph F. Smith to testify at the Smoot hearings. He left for Washington, DC, two days later, confident the Church could withstand the coming scrutiny. Reed had warned him, though, that senators would ask about every aspect of his home life and demand details about his plural marriages. As president of the Church, he would also be asked about his role as prophet, seer, and revelator to the Saints. The committee would want to know what influence he and his revelations would have on Reed and his actions in the Senate.26
On the first day of questioning, March 2, the committee room was packed with senators, lawyers, and witnesses. Members of women’s organizations opposed to Reed’s election were also present. At the chairman’s request, President Smith took a seat across from him at a long table. His gray hair and long beard were neatly combed, and he wore a simple black coat and gold-rimmed glasses. Pinned to his lapel was a small portrait of Hyrum Smith, his martyred father.27
Robert Tayler, the lawyer representing the Ministerial Association, opened the inquiry with questions about President Smith’s life. Turning his attention to revelation and its influence on the individual decisions of Church members, the lawyer then asked the prophet to explain when Church members might be obligated to obey revelation from the Church president. If he could get the prophet to admit that all members were required to obey his revelations, Tayler could show that Reed Smoot was not truly free to make his own decisions in the Senate.
“No revelation given through the head of the Church ever becomes binding and authoritative,” President Smith told him, “until it has been presented to the Church and accepted by them.”
“Do you mean,” asked Tayler, “that the Church in conference may say to you, Joseph F. Smith, the president of the Church, ‘We deny that God has told you to tell us this’?”28
“They can say that if they choose,” the prophet replied. “Every man is entitled to his own opinion and his own views and his own conceptions of right and wrong, so long as they do not come in conflict with the standard principles of the Church.”29
As an example, he noted that only a portion of Saints had practiced plural marriage. “All the rest of the members of the Church abstained from that principle and did not enter into it, and many thousands of them never received it or believed it,” he said, “but they were not cut off from the Church.”30
“You have revelations, have you not?” questioned the committee chairman. He was asking when a revelation from the Lord’s prophet would be considered a fundamental doctrine of the Church, something a faithful Latter-day Saint like Reed Smoot would feel obliged to obey.
President Smith chose his words deliberately. He had often received personal revelation through the Holy Ghost. As the prophet, he had also received inspired direction for the Saints. But he had never received a revelation for the entire Church in the Lord’s own voice—the kind of revelation found in the Doctrine and Covenants.
“I never said I had a revelation,” he told the chairman, “except so far as God has shown to me that so-called ‘Mormonism’ is God’s divine truth. That is all.”31
President Smith continued answering questions until the committee adjourned late that afternoon. When the hearing resumed the next day, the committee focused their questions more and more on plural marriage and the Manifesto. While he sought to respond accurately to their questions, President Smith avoided disclosing what he and other Church leaders knew about new plural marriages. He knew Congress would condemn him and the Church if this information came to light in the investigation.32
Furthermore, his guarded answers to the committee’s questions were based on his understanding that Saints who practiced plural marriages after the Manifesto did so at their own risk. For this reason, he believed the Manifesto had not forbidden him and his wives, or any other plural couples, from discreetly continuing to honor their sacred temple marriage covenants to each other.33
When Robert Tayler asked him if he thought it was wrong to continue living with a plural wife, President Smith said, “That is contrary to the rule of the Church and contrary as well to the law of the land.” But he then spoke openly of his refusal to abandon his large plural family. “I have cohabitated with my wives,” he said. “They have borne me children since 1890.”34
“Since that was a violation of the law,” said Tayler, “why have you done it?”
“I preferred to face the penalties of the law rather than abandon my family,” the prophet replied.35
Trying to root out the names of men who had married plural wives after the Manifesto, the senators asked him about the marriages of the apostles and several other members of the Church. The chairman of the committee also asked President Smith if he himself had performed any plural marriages after the Manifesto.
“No sir, I never have,” the prophet replied. He then followed his response with a carefully worded statement designed to prevent further scrutiny. “There have been no plural marriages solemnized by and with the consent or by the knowledge of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” he said.
“Since the Manifesto?” a senator asked.
“I mean that, of course,” President Smith clarified. In making this statement, he was not denying the existence of post-Manifesto plural marriages. Rather, he wanted to draw a subtle distinction between practices the Church and its councils sanctioned and those that individual Church members chose to follow according to their consciences. The Saints had indeed sustained the Manifesto in 1890, so the plural marriages performed by Church leaders had taken place without the consent of the Church as a whole.
“If an apostle of the Church had performed such a ceremony,” another senator asked, “would you consider that being with the authority of your Church?”
“If any apostle or any other man claiming authority should do any such thing as that,” President Smith said, “he would not only be subject to prosecution and heavy fine and imprisonment in the state under the state law, but he would also be subjected to discipline and excommunication from the Church by the proper tribunals of the Church.”36
After completing his testimony, which lasted five days, President Smith felt he had followed divine guidance in the witness chair. “I firmly believe the Lord did the best He could with the instrument through whom He had to work,” he stated.37
Still, his testimony provoked public outcry when it was published in the newspapers. People across the United States were shocked to learn that President Smith still lived with his five wives. They also doubted his credibility and sincerity as a witness and denounced Church leaders as liars and lawbreakers.38
“An avalanche of unfavorable public sentiment is now sweeping over us as a community,” the First Presidency’s secretary confided to a friend, “and about the only thing we feel like doing just now is to button up our coat collar, turn our back to the storm, and patiently wait.”39
While the Senate hearing continued in Washington, DC, the prophet returned to Salt Lake City, resolved to take steps to restore confidence in him and the Church. He had assured the committee that Church officials would discipline Saints who performed new plural marriages in violation of the Manifesto. He was now bound to give the Senate stronger proof that he and the Saints were serious about stopping new plural marriages.40
On April 6, 1904, the last day of general conference, he stood at the pulpit of the Tabernacle and read a new official statement on plural marriage in the Church. “Inasmuch as there are numerous reports in circulation that plural marriages have been entered into, contrary to the official declaration of President Woodruff,” he said, “I hereby announce that all such marriages are prohibited.”
The statement did not condemn the two hundred or so couples who had entered into plural marriage after the Manifesto or censure those who had continued to live with their plural families since that time. Yet it declared that new plural marriages were forbidden from now on, even outside the boundaries of the United States. “If any officer or member of the Church shall assume to solemnize or enter into any such marriage he will be deemed in transgression against the Church,” President Smith said, “and will be liable to be dealt with according to the rules and regulations thereof and excommunicated therefrom.”41
After reading the statement, which became known as the Second Manifesto, President Smith urged the Saints to be united in their support of this new declaration and restore the government’s confidence in them. Where the Manifesto had revealed that the Church was no longer under the command to practice plural marriage, this new statement acted to stop new plural marriages from that time forth.42 He hoped it would put an end to claims that Church members were not law-abiding citizens.
“I want to see today,” he said, “whether the Latter-day Saints representing the Church in this solemn assembly will not seal these charges as false by their vote.”
As a body, the Saints in the Tabernacle raised their arms to the square and sustained his words.43