Mormonism Made Him What He Is
BRODER, STEPHEN HESS and DAVID S.
GEORGE ROMNEY Mormonism Made Him What He Is by STEPHEN HESS and DAVID S. BRODER The most recent Gallup Poll showed Michigan's Governor Romney forging impressively ahead of President...
...I believe that God has made and presented to us a nation for a purpose—to bring freedom to all the people of the world...
...He thinks he has a private pipeline to God...
...Because George Wilcken Romney was born July 8, 1907, in the Mormon settlement of Colonia Dublan, Chihuahua, Mexico, some two hundred miles south of the border at El Paso, he had a special problem if he should aspire to the Presidency of the United States...
...He said some school boards were "going too far" in prohibiting "even spontaneous expressions of faith," but that in general "I'm not personally as concerned about increasing opportunities for prayers in schools as I am for increasing prayer in homes...
...Whether a man born out of the country of American parents is a "natural born" citizen has never been tested in the courts...
...It is what one scholar calls a "curious combination of typicality and peculiarity...
...And George Romney, age five, was "literally a revolutionary refugee...
...To me," said George Romney, "that is clear and precise...
...More succinctly, a one-time (and now disenchanted) adviser described Romney as a speaker in three words: "A dynamic bore...
...This is purest Mormon teaching (Doctrine and Covenants, 101: 77,80), but exotic fare for the average Republican contributor, who has come to expect nothing more exalted with his roast beef than an attack on the Democrats and their evil works...
...Calvin was a Frenchman, Luther a German, Wesley an Englishman, but Joseph Smith, Jr., was born in Sharon, Vermont, and grew up in Palmyra, New York...
...But Mormons are not conditioned to take a passive attitude toward the non-Mormon or "Gentile" world, as Saints call all outsiders...
...Thus, a paradox in Romney turns out to be a paradox in Mormonism itself...
...As one who has seen the true light, he is determined that his view shall prevail...
...Yet there are some Mormons in Utah (and a famous colony in Short Creek, Arizona) who are still polygamists...
...Said August Scholle, the president of the Michigan AFL-CIO, "The big clown...
...First of all," Romney said, "I don't think I'm required as a public official to discuss the doctrine of the LDS church...
...A few of them decided to skip church and enjoy an extra hour's sleep before leaving for the airport...
...The theological basis for this bias, stated in one of Joseph Smith's revelations, "Pearl of Great Price," is that Negroes, even before birth, wear the mark of Cain and are descendants of the union between Ham, the son Noah cursed, and Egyptus, daughter of a Pharaoh...
...Instead, he repeats the statement that Goldwater had already criticized: "I did not endorse you because I was not willing to compromise one iota the principles I fought for in San Francisco...
...They "competed" against Alaska Governor Walter J. Hickel and his wife in a carefully-staged dog sled race, which the Hickels somehow managed to lose...
...Romney, though often recounting his family's flight to Mexico, rarely makes it particularly plain that his grandfather was fleeing Federal authorities rather than abandon polygamy...
...That the Negro in Michigan has responded favorably to Romney is written in voting statistics: 1962, his first campaign, he received nine per cent of the Negro vote...
...As a devout Mormon, Romney firmly believes this and his political speeches bear witness...
...I resent with all my heart those scientists and psychologists who would tell us how to live when we have been given a Supreme Law and a Supreme Authority to guide us...
...One current problem where modern revelation has some pertinence is that of lawlessness and crime...
...Lenore Romney says of her husband, "He has always had tremendous confidence in himself," and an old friend remarks, "With George, it has never been a question whether he would be President...
...The church hall was a large, plain room, with pews in front, folding chairs in the back, filled to the far corners by 850 persons—one-fifth of the entire Alaska membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS...
...The three questions Romney is likeliest to face because of his church affiliation involve polygamy, the church's relations to the Negro, and its attitude toward church-state relations...
...Starting at around twelve years, a Mormon boy enters the first order of priesthood...
...Senate in 1902, it took more than two years for that body to agree to seat him...
...Re-elected to a third term the previous November as the pace setter of a Michigan sweep that also netted the Republicans a U.S...
...The Romneys have made some adaptations to the customs of the business and political world...
...In the stunned silence, Romney began by making the only sensible remark possible on the occasion: "You have just heard," he said, "the one person who can beat me in Michigan...
...Sometimes the two strains did not quite mesh...
...In all the twelve single-spaced pages, Romney never once concedes or even hints that there was an element of expediency—or even political necessity—in his decision to stay clear of the national ticket...
...Theology, probably more than glands, explains the amazing energy of this man, who was in his mid-fifties when he first ran for public office, and who has been compared to a "one-man earthquake, a tidal wave, an elemental force...
...The dangers of carrying a strong sense of one's own virtue and a missionary zeal into the political arena are many...
...Mrs...
...A joke that made the rounds in Detroit in 1964 went: "Romney might make a pretty good President, but I hate to have anyone use the White House as a steppingstone to Higher Office...
...Mormonism is an exceedingly difficult religion to live, and, just as in every other faith, there are many who consider themselves members of the church without abiding by all its prescriptions...
...Just when...
...During World War II he worked with Victor Reu-ther to combat segregated housing in Detroit...
...She spoke for only six minutes, but the reporters were left with mouths agape...
...He attempted to make this distinction in a dramatic meeting with the interracial Salt Lake Ministerial Association (composed of non-Mormon ministers) during a 1967 visit...
...Partly because they had been a highly disciplined and persecuted minority, the Mormons brought a history of cooperative action to Utah...
...Mormons, despite rigid convictions, are not a dour or anti-social people...
...They began serving liquor in their home after learning, through sad experience, that guests confronting a dry evening often fortified themselves too well in advance...
...Arriving in a snowstorm, the Romneys doffed their topcoats and slipped into sealskin parkas, lent them by an enterprising local furrier...
...He has marched with Martin Luther King through the exclusive Grosse Pointe suburb of Detroit, and he is on record in support of full-coverage Federal open-housing legislation...
...John F. Kennedy, who laughed off Richard M. Nixon's clumsy effort during their television debates to make a moral issue of President Truman's salty language, apparently did not take Romney's moralism as a joke...
...For he that keepeth the law of God hath no need to break the laws of the land...
...1. Mormonism is an American religion...
...The third issue of concern is the Mormon position on church-state relations...
...More to the point, George Romney, as a thoughtful Mormon, probably would not find the joke's premise so ridiculous...
...In Michigan, he has signed into law three bills providing transportation and supplemental services, such as health care and remedial reading, for parochial school pupils and tuition aid for students at private and parochial colleges...
...With the exception of two decades at a polygamous colony in Mexico, the Romneys have been closely identified with the old Utah Territory...
...Romney spoke with compassion of the Negro mothers raising children in the slums, then slid smoothly into a discussion of the concern all parents feel "over changing moral standards...
...Whatever its appeal to the voters, Romney's conspicuous purity makes some other Republicans squirm...
...It would be wrong for me to do so...
...You are from the Midwest, aren't you...
...Instead, they are trained to feel that "theirs is still the task of carrying the option of redemption and salvation to all men," writes Robert Mullen, the author of a highly laudatory book on the Latter-day Saints...
...Her message was a simple one, that the basic tests for the American people were moral, not material...
...This two-part presentation is adapted from their forthcoming book, The Republican Establishment: The Present and Future of the G.O.P...
...self-sufficient, yet quick to meet common problems with cooperative efforts...
...But, if Romney's assurance of his own righteousness irritates some Republicans, it is also his armor for political combat...
...You have no idea," he told the all-white congregation in the state that lies closest to the frontier, "what life is like in the ghettos of the East...
...When Newsweek, in 1967, attributed to him the improbable quote, "I call my best friends sons of bitches," Romney fired off an anguished letter to the editor denying he had said any such thing...
...E.: Oh, really...
...Columnist Joseph Alsop has correctly stated that the Governor "has a hearty laugh but a somewhat deficient sense of the ridiculous...
...He insists there is a distinction between "a religious faith which deals with life before and after this one on earth and public policy and our rights as citizens...
...And I will fortify this land against all other nations...
...Indeed, even before he entered political life, Romney's record on civil rights was exemplary...
...Thus they added to the existing image of the Western pioneer as an attractive, if somewhat contradictory, fellow: part rugged individualist, part communitarian...
...If Huey Long wished to make every man a king, it was Joseph Smith's inspiration to make every man a priest...
...The Romneys were escorted to the platform...
...Thus, for a practicing Mormon like George Romney, religion can become an almost all-consuming way of life...
...When Alfred Henry Lewis wrote a series on the Latter-day Saints for Cosmopolitan in 1911, polygamy was still fresh enough in memory for the articles to be given such lurid titles as "The Viper on the Hearth" and "The Viper's Trail of Gold...
...A close follower of the prophet even calculated that the Garden of Eden stood in Jackson County, Missouri...
...At a party, they may hold a "consomme on the rocks" to assure that their drinking guests are not self-conscious...
...R.: No, I was born in Mexico...
...Perhaps it is this Western-Mormon ambivalence that makes Romney's views so hard to pigeonhole...
...As recently as 1965, Church President David O. McKay wrote letters to the eleven Mormons in Congress urging them to vote against the move to repeal section 14 (b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, which authorizes state right-to-work laws...
...Both are right...
...For it is almost a proverb among Latter-day Saints that "as man is now, God once was...
...E.: I like Midwesterners...
...Church, was not satisfied...
...And Romney, when asked to label himself, enigmatically replies, "I'm trying to be as conservative as the United States Constitution, as progressive as Theodore Roosevelt, and as liberal as Lincoln...
...There is reportedly pressure on the church hierarchy for a change in doctrine on the Negroes...
...A close political associate of Romney's observed that during the 1962 debates with Governor John Swainson it was almost impossible for Romney to keep his remarks within the allotted time segments...
...We will not be known by whether we can put a man on the moon first, or build a bigger intercontinental missile—but [pause] by how we treat each other...
...Racial discrimination is the greatest social injustice we face...
...When discovered, they are promptly excommunicated...
...Meeting in a Catholic mission hall, barely two miles from the Mormon temple, where no Negro may enter, Romney was asked by the Reverend Louis Williams, a Baptist, if he accepted the tenet of his church that bars Negroes from the priesthood...
...In the Mormons, a social idealism seemed to be warring with a political-economic conservatism...
...Third, we are not a faith where a vote of the members...
...They neither smoke nor drink, even tea or coffee...
...Romney has said repeatedly that he believes "profoundly in the separation of church and state...
...You have no idea what it means for a child to reach first grade with a vocabulary of twenty words...
...R. (interrupting): No, no...
...when pressure mounted to institute a two-party system as a precedent to statehood, church leaders simply divided their congregations in half and told some of them to be Republicans and some Democrats...
...To insure that Saints are plugged in to life's meaning, the church has created an organization, which Richard T. Ely, a pioneer student of Mormonism, said in 1903, "is the most nearly perfect piece of social mechanism . . . excepting the German Army alone...
...3. Mormonism believes in self-deification through effort...
...Yet those who fully live it acquire an assurance that is awesome...
...It was to Salt Lake City that the first Mormon Romney, George's greatgrandfather, an English carpenter, took his family by oxcart in 1850, nine years after his arrival in the United States...
...McKinley, and, after his speech, dropped in on the "Miners and Trappers Ball,5' where he obligingly judged the beard-growing contest and rubbed noses, Eskimo style, with a series of pretty, costumed Alaska women...
...At home, at least, performance has out-weighed church doctrine...
...Romney once said that "fasting is basic to our worship, and prayer on appropriate occasions is to us like breathing...
...Abraham Lincoln, a Gentile, once observed, "In a dispute, it is fatal to be able to see the other fellow's point of view...
...Addressing a 1966 Lincoln Day dinner in Boston, he said: "I believe that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are divinely-inspired documents, written by men especially raised up by their Creator for that purpose...
...More than being merely American, Mormon doctrine is patriotically American, reflecting a kind of romantic nationalism peculiar to the Nineteenth Century...
...The new Michigan constitution, for which Romney was largely responsible, goes further than any other similar document to assure full civil rights...
...Romney's reply indicated the position he will take on this question in the campaign...
...Clearly those most embarrassed by the polygamous past are today's Mormons, so self-qonsciously middle-class...
...The Book of Mormon, which young Smith claimed he received from an angel in 1827, and on which he founded a religion, tells of the arrival of the Hebrews on the American continent before the Christian era...
...Romney stepped to the rostrum, slim, pretty, and amazingly youthful-looking for a fifty-seven-year-old grandmother of nine, and said, with perfect assurance, "Good morning, dear brothers and sisters...
...Even after Rockefeller gave up, Romney was still trying to strengthen the civil rights section of the 1964 Republican platform, and he has always insisted that it was the "Southern, rural, white" character of the Goldwater campaign that made it impossible for him to support his party's ticket...
...Yet despite the political problems of being a Mormon, it is almost certainly the literal truth to say that Romney would not be a Presidential contender were it not for his religious faith...
...Second," he said, "there is no question of the LDS position on civil rights...
...Laboriously, with none of the quickness and brevity of his wife, he moved toward his subject...
...We must deal with social injustice and with respect for law...
...Governor and Mrs...
...But to some the pre-announced fast was more sanctimonious than pious...
...Romney replied that "the same pipeline is available to Mr...
...Romney threw snow balls in the air for the television cameras, took a sightseeing flight to Mt...
...They do not curse...
...While President McKay had clearly slipped out of his spiritual role in this instance, there are presently no pressing public issues—such as birth control or medical care—on which Mormons hold doctrinal beliefs...
...By college age he will probably serve a two-year hitch as a missionary...
...We must not sacrifice one for the other...
...I've always had a lot to say, but nobody seemed to care until George became Governor," thanked them, and sat down...
...Copyright © 1967 by Stephen Hess and David S. Broder, to be published by Harper & Row...
...Mrs...
...Unlike the fatalistic theory of predestination, the Mormons' "free agency" prods its adherents into a life of action and good works—a life like Romney's...
...Or as Professor Thomas O'Dea, the sympathetic chronicler of the Mormons, explains: "God is God because he has risen to 'Godhood' by his own labor...
...My grandparents moved there because they were practicing polygamy...
...A more serious problem is the relationship of Negroes to the Mormon church, which now refuses them admittance to its priesthood...
...The Rev...
...For in that hour the churchgoing newsmen learned that, conventional as he might be in his acquiescence to the silly rituals of a political campaign, fundamentally George Romney was different from anyone who had previously run for President...
...Governor Romney and Mrs...
...In order to bring Romney into focus it is necessary to keep in mind four facts about Mormonism...
...They made a mistake...
...He quoted: "Let no man break the laws of the land...
...4. Mormonism encourages definite personality traits...
...But, he asked himself, can "the urgent need to correct social injustice justify defiance of the law...
...In 1890 the church leadership finally outlawed the practice...
...The tradition was further developed there by the need for communal water control...
...Speaking there to the Hellenic Republican Federation in October, 1966, immigrant Romney told his audience of their common bond: "There are many of you here tonight and in the radio audience who are not native-born Americans...
...GEORGE ROMNEY Mormonism Made Him What He Is by STEPHEN HESS and DAVID S. BRODER The most recent Gallup Poll showed Michigan's Governor Romney forging impressively ahead of President Johnson—by a margin of 49 to 41—in trial heats for the Presidential race of 1968...
...they're so normal...
...He has been criticized for this action by the Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, but told a representative of the group that he did not feel such measures "subsidized religious education...
...She was obviously to be reckoned into any calculation of Romney's assets for the Presidential campaign, and when she referred to the "four years we have been in state government," it was surely no slip of the tongue...
...Romney says "gosh," "by golly," and an occasional "aw, nuts...
...Before statehood, it controlled the territorial government through a one-party system...
...When confronted with difficult questions, he said, "it has always seemed to me that if God would reveal His truths to simpler ages, with simpler problems, certainly he would reveal them to ours...
...Use of such a phrase is contrary to my belief and my nature...
...How odd to go to church with a candidate who avowedly refuses to politick on Sundays and emerge with a crackling good story on a major domestic politi"I am completely the product of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," Romney had said to New York Times reporter Wallace Turner in August, 1965...
...While president of American Motors his company was the only major employer in Michigan to support publicly and lobby for a Fair Employment Practices Act on the state level...
...Romney told the ministers he would never accept contributions from the Mormon church for his own campaigns and declined to join the criticism of the Supreme Court decisions barring prayers from public schools...
...Under his administration as Governor a state Civil Rights Commission has been given real power...
...He was accompanied by his wife, Lenore, a staff of six, and forty newsmen...
...It is a proselytizing and a missionary church...
...Like his wife, he spoke with obvious sincerity of the conditions that breed disregard for laws and social standards...
...The Mormons have no professional clergy...
...The story was meant to illustrate the Mormon's devotion to the concept of separation of church and state, but there are historians who assert the principle has not always been honored in practice...
...Romney attend LDS Stake Priesthood Service...
...The authors are Stephen Hess, a former assistant to President Eisenhower, co-author (with Malcolm Moos) of Hats in the Ring and author of America's Political Dynasties, and now a fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics, and David S. Broder, nationally syndicated political correspondent and political analyst for The Washington Post...
...I believe I am entitled to be judged on the basis of my actions—not someone's ideas of what may be the precepts of my church...
...Imagine someone we know going off for twenty-four or forty-eight hours to fast and meditate, awaiting a message from the Lord on whether to run or not to run...
...The interview, surely not Romney's last test of this sort, recalled John F. Kennedy's 1960 confrontation with the Houston Ministerial Association...
...I'm a natural-born American, not a naturalized citizen...
...It is on the record...
...It is remarkable that the Mormons, in some ways so attuned to American sentiment, could have so misjudged it as to sanction "plural marriages"—the name they use...
...The concluding installment of this study of George Romney, analyzing his careers in business and politics, will appear in The Progressive next mnrtth...
...With the exception of Nelson Rockefeller, it would be hard to do...
...Eisenhower were referring, of course, to Article 2, Section I, Paragraph 4 of the U.S...
...But, in respect to the current practice, Wallace Turner argues that, since Mormon theology decrees that a male's opportunity for greater exaltation in the hereafter is largely based on his activities in the priesthood, "the ultimate effect of this aspect of LDS doctrine is as racist as anything asserted by the Theodore Bilbos and Robert Sheltons in the bigoted corners of the Southern states...
...Carefully avoiding any repetition of the offensive "vulgarism," as he called it, he said, "The quotation is particularly repugnant to my character...
...What brought the Romneys back to this country was the warring between Pancho Villa's rebels and the Mexican government...
...There is no record of whether Romney thought this funny...
...nothing else seems likely to have armed him for the burning sense of mission that has carried him this far in the battle for the 1968 Republican nomination...
...Palmer S. Ross, Negro pastor of Trinity A.M.E...
...During the Depression of the 1930's, for example, their leaders could set up a most elaborate public welfare program while being, at the same time, pungently hostile to the New Deal...
...We must do both...
...If anything, today's Mormons have tried to out-American their Gentile compatriots because of the habits of their fathers...
...The doctrine holds out hope to Negroes that if they live good lives they will eventually earn God's grace, the curse will be lifted, and they will be eligible for equal status among the Saints...
...And this land shall be a land of liberty . . . and there shall be no kings upon the land...
...Romney disagrees...
...The first installment is devoted entirely to interpreting the decisive impact of Mormonism on his life and career...
...Zion to the Jews may have been Israel, but to the Mormons, so said Joseph Smith, "The whole of America is Zion itself...
...Then your foreign birth prevents you from . . . Gov...
...Romney has been accused by his critics of applying these same simple standards to politics and politicians...
...But public opinion was so riled that when monogamist Reed Smoot, a Mormon apostle, was elected to the U.S...
...My people came back to this country in much the same circumstances that brought you or your parents or your grandparents here—destitute and somewhat afraid of the future...
...His successor, Brigham Young, starting in 1847, directed the church's migration to the Great Salt Lake Valley of Utah...
...Reporters filed out, puzzled...
...No vice whatsoever, no smoking, no drinking...
...As Tennyson said of Sir Galahad, his "strength is as the strength of ten, because [his] heart is pure...
...Had they heard two sermons or two political speeches, they asked...
...The Book of Mormon can be read as a story of "good guys" and "bad guys...
...The opening hymn was spirited...
...But in 1968, with a prominent Mormon in the headlines, there surely will be a rash of stories on polygamy in those publications that specialize in graffiti...
...But the most authoritative source, The President: Office and Powers} by Princeton's Professor Edward S. Corwin, after citing conflicting evidence, concludes: "At any rate, should the American people ever choose for President a person born abroad of American parents, it is highly improbable that any other constitutional agency would venture to challenge their decision...
...But being born in Mexico has had some political rewards, especially when campaigning for office in polyglot Detroit...
...1966, thirty per cent...
...My parents were American...
...I have fought for twenty-five years to eliminate discrimination...
...I'm not running—or considering running—as a member of my church, but on the basis of my personal beliefs and record...
...If my church prevented me from working to eliminate social injustice and racial discrimination," Romney replied, measuring his words carefully as he fought to remain calm, "I would not belong to it—but that is not the case...
...An eavesdropping cameraman for station WOOD-TV, Grand Rapids, overheard the Michigan Governor discuss this with Mrs...
...Williams of Salt Lake City, a Mormon bishop and professor of political science at the University of Utah, wrote: "The Mormon church, in trying to administer the kingdom of God on earth, was deeply immersed in the politics of the kingdom of men on earth...
...The Mormons are a homogenous group of predominantly Anglo-Scandinavian ancestry...
...My religion," said Brigham Young, the great organizer, "must be with me from one Monday morning to the next, the year around, or it will not answer me...
...George and Lenore, a handsome couple, sang with gusto about the day "when all that was promised the Saints will be given " Orson P. Millet, the president of the stake (as the LDS Church calls its geographical subdivisions), then introduced "Sister Romney...
...Fourth," Romney continued, "there is nothing in my faith that has influenced me other than to believe that every human being is a child of God as I am . . . and that he should have every opportunity I have...
...I believe personally that God has given a very clear statement on this point...
...She was a witty, dramatic, and highly professional platform performer in her own right, as becomes one who had taken a flier at an acting career in Hollywood before her marriage...
...However, Stephen Shadegg, in his book, What Happened to Goldwater?, implies that the Arizona Senator ruled out Romney as a potential running mate because of his Mexican birth...
...Senator and five new Representatives, leading President Johnson in both the Gallup and the Harris Polls, Romney left Lansing on February 17 for a series of speeches to the Lincoln's Birthday fund-raising dinners that every Republican of any prominence is required to make each year...
...These people, whose beliefs and practices are so idiosyncratic, and who actually took arms against the United States Government, are also as hyper-American as a rodeo or county fair...
...Mrs...
...Man, too, can be raised to Godlike status through his accomplishments in this world...
...Quoting Scripture, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, she said, "We have had our industrial revolution, our scientific revolution, our intellectual revolution...
...as God is now, man may become...
...Reporter Julius Duscha wrote in The Washington Post> "He is the kind of man who can make a political cliche . . . sound like a sentence from the Sermon on the Mount...
...According to the late President's friend, Paul Fay, Kennedy once said, "The one fellow I don't want to run against [in 1964] is Romney...
...Constitution: "No person except a natural born citizen . . . shall be eligible to the office of President...
...I'm entitled, as any other public official is, to be judged on my record...
...Nelson Rockefeller calls him a "progressive," while Barry Gold water says he "makes as conservative a speech as I'll ever make in my life...
...Joseph Smith took his small band of believers to Ohio, then Missouri, then Illinois, where he was murdered by a mob...
...I, too, was born in a foreign land, although of American parents...
...Both church and country have a Manifest Destiny...
...The Editors...
...1964, his percentage rose to nineteen...
...His holier-than-thou attitude permeates the incredible letter he wrote Goldwater in December, 1964, explaining why he had refused to support Goldwater during the campaign...
...If Romney really felt that strongly, he said, why did he not repudiate the teachings of his church...
...The church is the dominant factor in Utah politics...
...Kennedy was referring to Romney's much-publicized day-long fast before announcing his candidacy for Governor in 1962...
...is going to influence a question of doctrine...
...Scholle, if he cares to take advantage of it...
...2. Mormonism is rooted in the American West...
...When men take the law in their own hands, whether to correct social injustice or for other reasons, they open the way to anarchy, mob rule, and the loss of human liberty...
...The first stop was Anchorage, Alaska, and the first day, a Saturday, was in the classic tradition of American political hokum...
...It was an intense, emotional talk, and then, just as she seemed about to lose herself in tears, she regained her composure with a quip...
...What is there in it that evokes the peculiar sort of energetic evangelism, the righteousness and self-righteousness that underlie Romney's unique political appeal and at the same time cause so many of his political problems...
...This was no shy and stumbling candidate's wife, nor one who would confine herself to platitudes...
...The U.S...
...Does that sound like one of the old gang...
...But we will not be judged by our material or intellectual achievements...
...Whether it is more of a handicap than a help may be argued...
...John Eisenhower during a Republican fund-raising dinner in April, 1966: Mrs...
...This proselytizing urge may give Mormons a tendency to be argumentative and long-winded...
...When Joseph Smith, Jr., announced his candidacy for President before he was murdered by an anti-Mormon mob in 1844, his platform was the establishment of what he called "theo-democ-racy...
...But the church itself," he added, "should not become active or identified with a political party or candidate, nor should it become a special interest group seeking governmental funds...
...Senator Elbert D. Thomas, a Mormon and liberal Democrat who defeated Reed Smoot, a Mormon and conservative Republican, used to say that when Brigham Young was both head of the church and Governor of Utah, he would sit on one side of his desk in the morning to conduct state business and then switch to the other side for church work in the afternoon...
...II Nephi 10:11-12...
...It was there that George Romney spent most of his boyhood...
...the reporters, a bit self-conscious in the strange surroundings, to a front pew...
...They tithe, that is, give ten per cent of their gross income to the church...
...Eventually the rebels gave the Mormon community forty-eight hours to get out...
...To explore the personality, program, and performance of George W. Romney, The Progressive begins below a two-part portrait of this Republican contender...
...You name me one other man in the Republican Party who has gone as far as I did [in the cause of civil rights...
...On Sunday morning, reporters, awakened early by the Romney staff, rubbed the sleep from their eyes and noticed on the mimeographed schedule that the only event preceding the flight back to Seattle was listed as follows: 8 a.m., Alaska Standard Time...
...Tf a point in time must be fixed, Governor George W. Romney of Michigan began his Presidential campaign in the third week of February, 1967...
...What is this church that produced him...
...And, over the years, the church hierarchy has devised a truly staggering variety of activities to occupy the time of its faithful...
...Government rushed a train down from El Paso...
...In the meeting with the Salt Lake Ministerial Association, he said the churches should encourage their members to take part in politics and should take positions on issues which have moral implications...
...At least five of the Congressmen are known to have replied politely that they would appreciate the church hierarchy's staying out of their temporal business, and Romney has consistently opposed introduction of a right-to-work law in Michigan...
...They encouraged dancing, for instance, at a time when such frivolity was generally frowned upon in church circles...
...only the religious tone was the same as hers...
Vol. 31 • October 1967 • No. 10
