One of the oft-expressed late 19th century/early 20th century charges about the Church’s “un-American” nature centered on the Church’s involvement in politics. When the man who spoke for God, the argument went, directed you to vote in a given way, the pressure to protect your eternal salvation was too great for mortal man to resist.
My standard answer is that nobody claiming such a thing could possibly know much about Mormons or Mormon history. If we did everything we were told to do, why do we have to be told the same things at every General Conference? Why don’t we have a higher volume of fast offerings, perfect home teaching numbers, and Sunday lessons that always follow the manual?
Continue reading Dictating Politics: The Election of 1912 →
The victorious European and American powers drafted the Treaty of Versailles to settle affairs at the end of World War I. This Treaty also created the League of Nations, a prototype United Nations.
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was a staunch supporter of the League of Nations; the U.S. Senate, which by constitutional fiat must ratify treaties before they become the law of the land, was not, and ultimately voted against the Treaty. (The United States’ formal acknowledgment of the end of hostilities was the Porter-Knox Resolution, an act of the U.S. Congress passed in 1921 and signed by Warren G. Harding, Wilson’s successor.)
Continue reading Two Presidents Meet, 1919 →
Where our past is never very long ago