| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.2

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.2 | The History Cooperative

The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle. By Kathleen Flake. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 238 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95, cloth; $18.95, paper.)
In 1904 the U. S. Senate began hearings to decide whether to expel newly elected Republican senator from Utah, Reed Smoot, who was also an apostle in the Mormon Church. After four years of hearings, a senate committee voted to remove him, but the full Senate allowed him to retain his seat, and he went on to serve five full terms. This is the first book-length account of the trial, and it is an important study—wide-ranging, deeply researched, and full of insight.	1
For Flake, the trial was significant for both the Mormon Church and for the U. S. as a whole. It determined the kind of organization the church would be during the rest of the century and the nature of the relationship it would have with its larger society; it led the American people and their government to reconsider the meaning of religious liberty and the circumstances under which it would be extended to particular churches; and it set the terms by which Americans would think about those issues in the future.	. . .

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