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AHC: Mormon President

As Elektronaut just said, this isn't really much of an AHC.

My reading of contemporary accounts of the Romney '68 campaign is that his campaign was already falling to pieces by the time of the "brainwashing" remark; Jim Rhodes famously remarked that “watching George Romney run for the presidency was like watching a duck try to make love to a football”, because it was so undisciplined and unconfident. I think he could've properly given Nixon a run for his money in an ATL but Nixon would still probably come up top.

Udall '76 I think is probably the most likely.
 
I guess if you want a handful of other figures who could have been Presidential, there's Goodwin Knight who was the Governor of California that got his career ended during the disastrous "Switch" of 1958. There's also some people that maybe could be thrown on a Vice Presidential ticket due to their experience like Wayne Morse or Gordon Smith. I had heard somewhere that there was talk about running Reed Smoot in the backrooms during the 1920s, but I can't imagine the talks were serious due to the religious prejudices of the times.
 
I always thought that George Dern (two term Utah Governor and FDR's first Secretary of War) was a Mormon, but no, he's actually a member of the United Churches of Christ. Shame on me for not paying more attention.

I guess maybe Herbert B. Maw as a surprise contender for the 1944 Democratic Vice-Presidential nomination. I doubt he'd get past the smoke-filled halls of the convention, due to both his religious beliefs and his relative isolation as a one-term Governor of Utah, but I doubt his religion would sink FDR's chances for a fourth term.

Really any major LDS Democratic politician from Utah like Orrice Abram Murdock Jr., James William Robinson, or Elbert D. Thomas (who was actually nominated in 1944, but we all know how little that actually means). Of these mentioned, I think Thomas is the most interesting.

Another thought is Jimmy Carter, trying to appeal to both the west and some Mormon voters after beating Udall, picks Udall himself or someone like Frank Moss
 
Romney 2016 might be an interesting thing to play around with, especially if Santorum or a renewed Huckabee gets the nod in 2012 because Romney is sitting it out Because Reasons and the wingnut GOP gets the blame for losing to Obama.

Trump would probably do to Mitt what he did to Jeb, however.
 
George Romneys parents were missionary workers and George was born out of the country so many would people would say he would be ineligible to run. (he was eligible )
 
George Romneys parents were missionary workers and George was born out of the country so many would people would say he would be ineligible to run. (he was eligible )

The only people who would say he was ineligible would be those who wouldn't vote for him, anyways. The legal consensus has always been that children of US citizens born abroad are natural born citizens and, thus, eligible for the Presidency.
 
Of these mentioned, I think Thomas is the most interesting.
Thomas’ background in and views on East Asia ought to make his Presidency interesting - for one thing, given his anti-colonialism in other contexts, I imagine it probably puts the US against France in Vietnam from the get-go. Does anyone know what he died of?
 
Well as has been noted earlier, it's actually not that difficult with Mitt Romney nor even George Romney.

An interesting question would be, who would be the earliest conceivable Mormon President?

If we're looking at prominent Mormons who ran for the Presidency, I can only really recall the two Romneys, Huntsman, Udall, and, well, interestingly, Joseph Smith, Jr. himself, who ran in 1844 with Sidney Rigdon, the First Counselor in the First Presidency of the LDS Church, as his running mate. Indeed, when Smith was killed the same year, most of the Quorum of Twelve were out of Nauvoo, campaigning for him.

I think it's fair to say that Joseph Smith, Jr. didn't have a snowball's chance in the Telestial Kingdom to go that far, so let's expand our criteria, shall we?

Prominent Mormons who have served in high-profile public office. Well, there's Brigham Young who was the territorial governor of Utah, but he definitely had far less of a chance than Joseph Smith, since he openly practiced polygamy, managed to make himself hated by both James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln, had preached that slavery was ordained by God from the pulpit, and during the American Civil War had explored the idea of unilaterally declaring Utah an independent state (not with a mind to join the Confederacy, but to set up an sovereign theocracy of Deseret).

So he's out.

Moving into the twentieth century, we have Reed Smoot, the first member of the Quorum of the Twelve not to be a polygamist since the 1840s, who in 1902 was elected by the Utah legislature to the US Senate. He was very controversial at the time, and there were these very long hearings in the Senate as to whether or not he secretly supported polygamy and whole bunch of stuff when they were deciding to seat him. They kept calling in all sorts of witnesses, asking all sorts of question, among other people called in to give testimony were the Prophet-President of the Church at the time, Joseph F. Smith, nephew of the Church's founder, and the Senators grilled him about how precisely it went about when he received revelations from God. Now you might well think that Mormonism is a very bizarre religion (I certainly do), and the very pointed questions the senators asked and the at times outlandish, at times evasive answers given make for some truly fascinating reading, they do in retrospect seem quite irrelevant to the matter at hand they were supposed to be investigating. In the end, the Senate narrowly failed to gather together the two-thirds majority needed to prevent Smoot from being seated, and he was duly sworn in.

Despite the controversy surrounding his arrival in the Senate, as he kept getting re-elected and gained seniority, he actually over time became a fairly respected politician and lawmaker, as fellow Senators and Congressmen learned that if they looked past his religion, he was most decidedly a man you could do business with. His name appears as one of the authors of the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which had been blamed by many as having deepened the Great Depression something severely. In 1932, despite him being an Apostle in the religious hierarchy of his Church, Utah Mormons overwhelmingly voted against him in that year's senatorial election, instead picking Democrat Elbert D. Thomas, who would go on to serve for 18 years.

Still, I would very much be sceptical that even during his best days during the Roaring Twenties did Reed Smoot ever have a chance if he had sought the Presidency (if indeed he ever wanted it, which is in itself highly doubtful). So he's out.

The next person on the list would be Ezra Taft Benson, who served as Dwight Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture.

Now Ezra Taft Benson was very much a staunch conservative and anti-Communist, and he seldom hesitated to mix religion and politics. In his mind, Communism was a "secret combination" prophesied by the Book of Mormon, and when he became President of the LDS Church in the 1980s, many of his sermons talked about an imminent time when the Constitution would hang by a thread, and Mormons would have to save the country, and anarchy and lawlessness was at the door, it was all very apocalyptic, all very millennialist. He was also very much a racist and an opponent of civil rights.

Add to it that he wasn't particularly popular with farmers during his time as Secretary of Agriculture, and it's quite clear that this man was never really going to have the support of more than perhaps the Utah chapter of the John Birch Society if he decided to run. Or if indeed he ever decided to seek any elected public office.

So, who else are there? I honestly cannot think of any other Mormon who was ever a high-profile name in American politics prior to George Romney.

There is something odd about the fact that the first Mormon to actually seek the Presidency since Joseph Smith was also the first Mormon to actually stand a serious chance.
 
Thomas’ background in and views on East Asia ought to make his Presidency interesting - for one thing, given his anti-colonialism in other contexts, I imagine it probably puts the US against France in Vietnam from the get-go. Does anyone know what he died of?

No, unfortunately I can't find a cause of death, and I've looked in a few places. Given his age, a few months from 70, it could be anything.

But I did find this article from 2012. It starts with Mitt Romney, but is mostly about Thomas and his relationship with the Jews and his work to let in more Jewish refugees. If he is President, I suspect he might be more pro-Israel right off the bat, which could influence later events at home and abroad. I can imagine him telling the French to go stuff it, along with the rest of the European colonial powers.

Mitt Romney’s visit to Israel will generate much speculation on the role Jewish voters will play in the U.S. presidential election. His visit may also spark discussion about Mormon-Jewish relations in the wake of the recent controversy over a Mormon temple that conducted posthumous baptism ceremonies for some Holocaust victims.

But another Mormon’s visit to Jerusalem, 99 years ago, deserves some of the spotlight too. Because that little-known visit ultimately had a decisive impact on Jewish history and America’s response to the Holocaust.

In 1913, 29-year-old Elbert Thomas and his wife, Edna, wrapped up their five-year stint in charge of a Mormon mission in Japan and prepared to return to their native Utah. They decided to pay a short visit to Turkish-occupied Palestine on the way home.

The Holy Land figures prominently in Mormon theological tracts. Thomas was keenly aware of Mormon prophecies about an ingathering of the Jewish exiles and the rebirth of the Jewish homeland.

“We sat one evening on the Mount of Olives and overlooked Jerusalem,” he later recalled. “We read the poetry and the prophecy, the forebodings and the prayers, with hearts that reached up to God.” Under “stars the likes of which you see nowhere else in the world but on our own American desert, out where I grew up,” Thomas read the lengthy “Prayer of Dedication on the Mount of Olives” by Orson Hyde, an early Mormon leader and fervent Christian Zionist.

“Consecrate this land … for the gathering together of Judah’s scattered remnants … for the building up of Jerusalem again after it has been trodden down by the Gentiles so long,” Hyde had written in 1841. “Restore the kingdom unto Israel, raise up Jerusalem as its capital…. Let that nation or people who shall take an active part in behalf of Abraham’s children, and in the raising of Jerusalem, find favor in Thy sight. Let not their enemies prevail against them … but let the glory of Israel overshadow them.”

The moment, the mood and the words moved Thomas to feel a deep spiritual connection to the Jewish people and to commit himself to becoming one of those who would “take an active part in behalf of Abraham’s children.” And three decades later, he was presented with an opportunity to do so.

Jewish People of Europe, a lobbying group led by Jewish activist Peter Bergson. Thomas signed on to its full-page newspaper ads criticizing the Allies for abandoning European Jewry. He also co-chaired Bergson’s 1943 conference on the rescue of Jews, which challenged the Roosevelt administration’s claim that nothing could be done to help the Jews except winning the war. Although a loyal Democrat and New Dealer, the Utah senator boldly broke ranks with President Franklin D. Roosevelt over the refugee issue.

Thomas played a key role in advancing a Bergson-initiated congressional resolution calling for creation of a government agency to rescue Jews from the Nazis. Sen. Tom Connally (D-Texas), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, initially blocked consideration of the resolution. But when Connally took ill one day, Thomas, as acting chair, quickly introduced the measure. It passed unanimously.

Meanwhile, senior aides to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. had discovered that State Department officials had been obstructing opportunities to rescue Jewish refugees. Morgenthau realized, as he told his staff, that the time had come to say to the president, “You have either got to move very fast, or the Congress of the United States will do it for you.” Armed with a devastating report prepared by his staff, and with congressional pressure mounting, Morgenthau went to FDR in January 1944.

Roosevelt could read the writing on the wall. With just days to go before the full Senate would act on the resolution, Roosevelt preempted Thomas and the other congressional advocates of rescue by unilaterally creating the agency they were demanding: the War Refugee Board.

Although understaffed and underfunded, the board played a major role in saving more than 200,000 Jews during the final 15 months of the war. Among other things, the board’s agents persuaded a young Swede, Raoul Wallenberg, to go to German-occupied Budapest in 1944. There, with the board’s financial backing, he undertook his now-famous rescue mission. Thomas’ action in the Senate was an indispensable part of the chain of events that led to Wallenberg’s mission.

The Swedish government, together with Holocaust institutions and Jewish communities around the world, recently launched a yearlong series of events commemorating this summer’s 100th anniversary of Wallenberg’s birth. One hopes these celebrations will include appropriate mention of the role played by Americans such as Thomas in making Wallenberg’s work possible.

And as Romney retraces some of Thomas’ steps in Jerusalem, he will have special reason to feel proud of the role played by a fellow Mormon in helping to save Jewish lives.

Rafael Medoff is director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and the coauthor with Sonja Schoepf Wentling of the new book “Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the ‘Jewish Vote’ and Bipartisan Support for Israel.”

There is something odd about the fact that the first Mormon to actually seek the Presidency since Joseph Smith was also the first Mormon to actually stand a serious chance.

Does it? It makes sense to me. When Smith tried running for President, he was murdered over his religion.

I can imagine a lot of Mormon politicians being hesitant to try for a national stage until they felt like they were suitably integrated and seen as respectable Americans. Both Romneys were governors outside of Utah, which helped give them credibility that they could be elected by non-Mormons. Mo Udall was an Arizonan Jack Mormon, which arguably hurt him as the Church was against him for his liberal policies, and he was tarred with their racist history during the 1976 primaries.
 


Ezra Taft Benson was almost Governors Wallace's running mate but he found out he would be kicked out of the church had he accepted. If he was number 2 on the ticket with Nixon in 68 ,come 1974 he would be p.o.t.u.s.
 
Ezra Taft Benson was almost Governors Wallace's running mate but he found out he would be kicked out of the church had he accepted. If he was number 2 on the ticket with Nixon in 68 ,come 1974 he would be p.o.t.u.s.

It would have been a decidedly unwise move for Nixon strategically speaking to pick Ezra Taft Benson as his running mate. He would only have appeal in places that the Nixon campaign to count on winning anyway, whereas Agnew with his reputation as a moderate law-and-order Republican from Maryland would help Nixon's appeal in the industrial states and New England and reinforce the image of the "Silent Majority" in a way that a fire and brimstone preacher from a religion viewed by much of the American mainstream with a lot of scepticism could not hope to.
 
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