Theodore Tobiason {1864-1929) had been president of the Swedish Mission for only a few days when he learned of a challenge that frightened his missionaries: an old law, dating to 1868, allowed ministers of Sweden’s state church to summon anyone teaching religion to appear before a council of priests for an inquiry into those teachings. If those teachings offended the council, they were empowered to impose a fine; if the fine were not paid, they could imprison the teacher. The ministers could call upon Sweden’s police to enforce their fines and prison terms. Although the law had fallen into disuse, the Swedish church revived it in 1913 to use against Latter-day Saint missionaries; in a few places, even Swedes who provided a place for the Saints to meet on Sundays were threatened with similar fines and imprisonment.
And the elders, especially those in the northern part of the country where the law was most often used, were fearful. Two elders who had been fined had completed their missions and returned to America before the fine could be collected, while other elders had been fined but were appealing their fines to a higher court, and still others had been summoned to appear before the priests’ council.
President Tobiason considered his options. When elders were summoned or fined, President Tobiason could move them to other towns, making it difficult for the ministers’ councils to locate them – but that would antagonize the councils, putting at risk any other missionary who came to work there. Constantly shuffling the elders would also disrupt the Latter-day Saint work. Instead, President Tobiason decided that the elders must stand their ground and continue to perform their duties as elders, and the Mission would support them with advice, money, and encouragement.
While President Tobiason was visiting the Saints in Vesteros in November 1913, one of the elders was served with notice to appear before the priests’ council. President Tobiason had been planning to assign that elder to a new town, but now he decided not only to leave that elder where he was, but to send him a second elder to work with him there, “ showing these good ministers that instead of us paying any attention to their orders we will only double up and work with greater energy than before … We do not want them to get the idea that we are afraid to do our duty.”
Whenever he learned that the ministers were acting against his elders, President Tobiason encouraged the elders to do their duty. “Go and see what they have got to say to you,” he advised two elders in December. “Do not be excited when you appear before the priests, but be calm, seek for the spirit of the Lord and that will guide you in what you shall say when you shall stand before these fellows.” He cautioned them “not [to] be very sassy to the ministers, but treat them with respect … Don’t be afraid, they cannot hurt you.”
When his elders received a heavy fine, President Tobiason advised them not to pay it. “I think it is done just to scare you and I would not pay any attention to them. … If the worse should come to the worst, why it would not hurt any of us if we had to go to jail for two or three weeks. … They cannot do anything to us if they did get us there, only feed us and give us a place to stay, so I would not be afraid of them, but be like the apostles were of old.” “We have not broken any law or done anything wrong and if the ministers of the Swedish Church and the Swedish people can afford to persecute our elders and put them in Jail because they preach the gospel, I say let them put us in.”
The elders did as their president instructed him: They carried on their work as missionaries, attended the ministers’ councils when summoned, and politely answered their questions. When fined, they refused to pay; when ordered to jail after all appeals had been exhausted, they served prison sentences of from 11 days to a month. President Tobiason was optimistic that such persecutions would not last long. “I do not think they will do much after these cases have been disposed of. I think they will get tired of trying to make us pay money when they see we are only a source of expense to them and that we will neither frighten nor cease to do our work.”
In the spring of 1914, President Tobiason became aware of another threat against the Church in Sweden. “There are some measures before the Riksdag against our people. We do not know exactly what they are, or what the outcome will be.” He soon learned what those measures were: “Some of our good friends are trying to get some measures before the Riksdag to have all the elders banished and the saints curtailed in their privileges.”
Just as had happened ten years earlier when the United States Senate investigated Latter-day Saint teachings and practices, and in 1911 when the British Parliament called for an investigation of the activities of missionaries there, the Swedish Riksdag opened an inquiry into the teachings of missionaries in Sweden.
The Swedish inquiry focused on two closely related questions: Did the elders encourage Swedish subjects to emigrate to the United States? and were the elders persuading Swedish women and girls to emigrate to become the plural wives of Mormon men in Utah?
Emigration was perfectly legal under Swedish law – the King’s subjects were free to come and go as they pleased, to emigrate to the United States or to any other country as they chose. But in recent years, the old, false tales that had circulated through much of the world for generations had resurfaced. Some Swedish pastors and newspaper editors claimed that Mormon emigrants were chiefly young women destined for polygamy or white slavery.
Because Church leaders had already begun to encourage converts to remain at home and help to build up the Church in their own lands, missionaries no longer encouraged the Saints to emigrate. Still, when Swedish members decided to emigrate anyway, often to join family members who had already gone to the United States, the Church assisted them in making travel arrangements, and in organizing small companies led by American elders. Such men often had experience as emigrants themselves, and could assist first-time travelers, especially since they spoke both Swedish and English.
To protect the Swedish Mission, President Tobiason refused to correspond with Swedish Saints who wrote to the mission office for information on fares and dates of sailing. Instead, he wrote to elders laboring near such inquirers, and instructed the elders to visit potential emigrations in person, giving their instructions orally rather than in writing. President Tobiason cautioned his elders to be even more wary of speaking publicly about Utah or anything that could be interpreted as encouraging emigration. “We are not acting as emigration agents at all. We only look after our own elders, but sometimes people want to go along with our elders, because they can speak the language and it is a help to them, but we are not in any sense emigration agents.” “We teach the people not to emigrate, but to stay here, that we do not want them to leave this country and if they leave we cannot help it any more than the State Church ministers can help that thousands of their members leave every year.”
President Tobiason was in Malmo at a conference when he received word that he was summoned to appear before a committee of the Riksdag. “I returned at once and met with the committee July 10th. We were told that they had heard one side of this question and desired to hear the other.” When he entered the committee room, President Tobiason was surprised to see another witness called to speak to the same committee: Pastor P.E. Oslev, the minister who had been so active in the past two years, speaking against the Church and misrepresenting the extent and purpose of Latter-day Saint emigration. “We were each given the privilege to speak, he making his accusations and I the privilege of answering all that he had said.”
“Before we had been before the committee a half an hour the sympathy seemed to be all with us. They could see the old stories he had been telling them were nothing but the old worn out yarns that had been told and re-told for the last sixty and seventy years. They said to him, ‘Mr. Oslev, if you have any evidence against these people, produce it. We do not care to hear any of these old stories that we have heard so many times.’ … I asked the gentlemen of the committee to be fair with us and do as the Senate committee had done and as had been done in England, make a thorough investigation by unprejudiced and honorable men and the results would be just the same.”
President Tobiason was prepared with the facts to correct claims made by his opponent. The pastor had claimed that the elders had shipped eight young girls from the Swedish town of Lulea to the harems of Utah in 1913; President Tobiason had investigated that claim, and reported that no Latter-day Saints immigrants – either men or women – had gone from the Lulea Conference during the preceding six years.
“When it came to the emigration question he [Pastor Oslev] began to read some of our hymns where we sing about Zion and read some of the old sermons where we preach about the Gathering of Israel. This was the evidence he had that we were trying to get young girls and people to go to Utah! The Riksdags man said, ‘If that is all you have got we do not care for [it].” “I told them the facts in the matter and proved to them conclusively that the statements he had made were false from beginning to end … He did not have anything to say contrary thereto.”
When the pastor testified that Mormon literature was degrading and had a pernicious effect on society, President Tobiason, produced copies of missionary literature, together with 15 copies of the Book of Mormon, and presented them to the investigating committee; he also offered to provide copies for every member of the Riksdag, “feeling that if they would read this book, it will remove a great deal of prejudice from their minds and make out of some of them friends for our cause.” The committee requested that President Tobiason obtain for them data on birth and death rates in Utah, sanitary conditions there, and other facts, which President Tobiason knew would create a good impression in the minds of his questioners.
“When we were through with the hearing,” President Tobiason reported, “the members of the committee came up and shook hands very heartily with me and thanked us very kindly for the evidence and information that we had given them. They told us that they would be as unbiased and unpartisan as it was possible to be when they handled our case.”
Then followed a period of waiting for the Riksdag to deliberate. Demonstrating for his elders his determination not to let fears for the future interfere with present mission work, President Tobiason traveled into Russia and Finland to visit the few members of the Church in those lands. When he returned to Stockholm in early August, he learned that another of his elders had been sentenced to jail by a priests’ council. “I see that Brother Fernelius expects to go and labor with the spirits in prison for a few days. I hope he will be successful in doing some good there. I know that if he goes to jail for a few days it will have an influence over the people in your neighborhood … and will thus be a cause to investigate. Possibly some honest soul be brought into the light of the gospel through the efforts of the adversary to overcome and hinder the work of the Lord.”
Finally, on the night of August 13 and 14, the Mormon bill came before the Riksdag for final speeches and voting. Some legislators spoke in favor of permitting the Latter-day Saints to continue working in Sweden. “I will say that when these men who defended our case in the Riksdag stood before the people that they were listened to with the closest of attention and their arguments were unanswerable,” said President Tobiason. When the speeches ended, 49 legislators voted in favor of banishing the American Latter-day Saints and curtailing the religious freedoms of Swedish Saints; 73 voted to permit the elders to remain and to allow the Swedish Saints to worship as they pleased. “We feel very grateful to the Lord and acknowledge His hand in this our deliverance once again, and I trust, my brother, that we will all show our gratitude to our Father by being more diligent and more faithful in the future in striving to spread the truths of the gospel inasmuch as we have had the privilege of staying here longer.”
Within a period of only ten years, the Church had survived hostile scrutiny by the governments of the United States, Great Britain, and Sweden. As the decades passed and the Church entered new parts of the world, other investigations by other governments would occur. For now, however, Latter-day Saints were free to carry on the work of spreading the gospel and establishing the Church.
Where do you find this stuff?? I can only imagine the hours of searching, research, and writing that went into compiling this post.
Another good report! Thanks, Ardis.
I have known some missionaries over the years that would likely have been improved by spending a week or two in jail. Who knows? Maybe it would have made me a better missionary too!
Almost nothing you could have said would tickle me more, TOClark. Thank you.
To sort of answer your question, I love to use collections of correspondence. I do need to supplement that with general background research, but when a man keeps copies of his own outgoing letters, I can often find much of what I need in one place. It does take sifting, and careful selection in order to tell a story without getting bogged down in minutiae, but it’s a satisfying kind of storytelling because it comes directly from the people involved without a lot of filtering through journalists or earlier historians.
For what it’s worth, I think I may be the first to report in any detail on this Swedish experience. Everybody knows something about the Smoot hearings, and the Churchill investigation is becoming better known, but when you find a third very similar national investigation, that counts as a pattern and a legitimate historical discovery.
Mark B., even our homemade yogurt and granola would probably have tasted better after a week or two in jail. Maybe we should propose this as a regular missionary activity?
I guess I always assumed that the LTM/MTC was a kind of “jail” experience … 🙂
Well, I will not say you are wrong …
I liked “go and labor with the spirits in prison for a few days.” 1 Peter 3 and D&C 76 have the Son preaching to the spirits in prison, but we’d have to wait until 1918 for the vision of faithful elders continuing the work. Somewhat prophetic of President Tobiason, there.
This is a very interesting pattern that continues to repeat itself.
In regards to going to jail peacefully, the missionaries while my oldest served in the Dominican Republic (1994-1995), were told never to stop for the traffic police, who were only looking to shake down “rich Americans.”
What a story, Ardis!
I recall hearing about something like this many years ago from a professor at BYU, but not in this much detail. I wonder if it was this same event, or a different one in another Scandinavian country. I’ll try to remember to send him a note tomorrow.
Thanks Ardis, this is a great story.
Did I get the timeline right: was Tobiason’s trip to Russia and Finland in 1914? I’m asking this because I read elsewhere that the Finnish branch didn’t receive any visitations from Sweden in 1914-1929. There was a missionary, who visited Finland in 1913. After that, the only contact the Finnish members had was the magazines of the Swedish mission send to them. So, now I’m wondering if Tobiason just traveled through Finland to Russia, or if he visited the Finnish members.
Niklas, in his letters reporting his activities that summer, Tobiason says he called on people in Finland with whom he had been corresponding. There is very little detail available, though, because war broke out within hours of his return, and his letters became filled with what he was doing next rather than reporting on what he had done in the previous few days.
Niklas, I just ran through my transcriptions to be sure I was remembering correctly. Yes, Pres. Tobiason went into Finland and visited four families there before crossing back into Sweden One of his elders, Victor E. Erickson, spent much of the summer of 1914 in Finland, and another elder (Monson — I need to scout up his first name) traveled with Pres. Tobiason on his trip.
So while these short visits may not appear in the formal Finnish history — perhaps because they were so quickly overshadowed by war conditions — there was without doubt some personal contact in Finland with elders of the Swedish Mission in the summer of 1914.