| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Kathleen Flake. The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. xiii, 238. Cloth $49.95, paper $18.95.
The Mormons prosper. So expansive is their growth and so distinctive their character and history that influential non-Mormon analysts construe the movement as a new religious tradition—perhaps the most important to arise since Islam. Exactly one century ago, however, the sprawling western Latter-day Saint (LDS) church-kingdom writhed in crisis.	1
Traditional accounts of Mormonism's traumatic reentry into American culture tell of submission to an indignant, steel-armed federal government that forced the Saints, upon pain of corporate extinction, to surrender polygamy and theocracy. Statehood for Utah followed. Kathleen Flake focuses on a subsequent extension of this late nineteenth-century history, weaving a more interesting, illuminating, complex, and persuasive tale. "The Mormon Problem," Flake argues, was not eliminated through legal force in the 1890s. Instead, resolution came during the first decade of the twentieth century, accomplished through political compromise satisfying the principal interests of both the nation and the LDS Church. She shows, moreover, that the transformation of Mormonism into something acceptable to a country that was itself changing is also the story of the evolving relation of churches to the state in the early twentieth century.	. . .

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