[Abstract]

The present study analyzes the highest leadership of the LDS (“Mormon”) Church as a social elite. To determine the extent to which the Mormon “General Authorities” constituted an elite within the Mormon community, a collective biography is presented of the 124 men who were part of the Mormon hierarchy, 1832-1932.

The family interrelatedness of the Mormon hierarchy was one prominent aspect of their social elitism. Aside from the fact that more than twenty-two percent of the appointees were sons of other General Authorities, the Mormon hierarchy revered relationships as distant as sixth cousin. The Mormon practice of polygamy enabled men to marry daughters, nieces, cousins, granddaughters, and former wives of other General Authorities. Through these marriages, distant kinship relationships were reinforced and unrelated men were brought tin the hierarchical family. Between fifty and 100 percent of the echelons of the hierarchy were interrelated up to 1932.

Economic wealth in the hierarchy tended to be as much as ten times that of non-members of the hierarchy within the Mormon community, though wealth tended to be a function of ecclesiastical status within the hierarchy, a man’s economic growth tended to stagnate during the first few years of his tenure in the hierarchy. Wealth came to Mormon General Authorities by direct and indirect benefits that correspond to length of tenure as well as ecclesiastical position.

The Mormon hierarchy exercised monolithic political control for fifty years, after which its political authority declined as pluralism increased within the Mormon community. During its fifty year ascendancy, the General Authorities controlled elections and legislation on the municipal, county, and territorial levels of areas in which Mormon population predominated. Forced by the federal government to surrender political hegemony and theocracy, the Mormon hierarchy became actively involved in partisan politicians in 1891, after which its political authority began a slow process of erosion. Although the General Authorities periodically sought to reassert former theocratic prerogatives, the Mormon populace became increasingly less responsive to such political direction.

Despite the religious context, the elitism of the Mormon hierarchy was compatible with social characteristics of widely disparate elite power structures. The Mormon hierarchy at its apex was a reflection of the elitist goals of the American bourgeois power structures, both local and national, that have traditionally sought to replicate the aristocratic power structures of static societies within the more fluid social structure of America.