A misleading statement at best. Smoot was not just a member or volunteer in the Church, he was a member of the 12 Apostles.
This was the rough equivalent of having a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church elected to the Senate. Not surprisingly, some were concerned about such a highly placed member of a church recently involved in serious conflict with the US government being a senator.
A misleading statement at best. Smoot was not just a member or volunteer in the Church, he was a member of the 12 Apostles.
This was the rough equivalent of having a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church elected to the Senate. Not surprisingly, some were concerned about such a highly placed member of a church recently involved in serious conflict with the US government being a senator.
* * * *
The heart of the Reed Smoot affair was the issue of polygamy (plural marriage). Smoot was not a polygamist.
The Senate's issue with Smoot dated to the 1898 election of U.S. Representative Brigham Henry Roberts of Utah. B.H. Roberts was a polygamist, and was a polygamist at the time of his election to Congress, two years after Utah became a state based in part on the condition that polygamy would be illegal (it's illegal in the Utah Constitution, which provides that the United States must consent to any amendment of that provision).
1898, as you'll note, was eight years after LDS President Wilford Woodruff's 1890 Manifesto on polygamy and the LDS Church claimed to have ended polygamy.
However, the LDS Church quietly continued to perform a small number of polygamous marriages after 1890 Manifesto, in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and the 1890 Manifesto didn't break up the large number of existing polygamous relationships (which would have been extremely cruel).
Congress had refused to seat B.H. Roberts because he was a polygamist.
Smoot's 1902 election set off four years of hearings on the fact that the LDS Church continued to practice polygamy and perform polygamous marriages. The perceived issue for Smoot was whether he could take an oath to uphold the Constitution while being such a high-ranking member of the LDS Church, which was still, at the time of his election, violating the laws of the U.S. regarding polygamy, and was violating the terms of the Utah Constitution, Utah law, and the conditions under which Utah had been permitted to become a State and elect Senators. Polygamy, in the eyes of those practicing it, was the law of God and not something that the laws of man could affect.
During the Reed Smoot Hearings, LDS President Joseph F. Smith issued the Second Manifesto (the 1904 Manifesto) which established excommunication for polygamy.
But - the Reed Smoot Hearings? They were, at the core, about polygamy.