hers in a number of public schools in Utah by the orders
of the First Presidency. (These orders were withdrawn after the exposure
before the committee.) Church control had gone so far in Brigham City,
Box Elder County, Utah, that in a dispute between the City Council and
the electric lighting company of the city, the local ecclesiastical
council interfered. In the same city, two young men built a dancing
pavilion that competed with the Church-owned Opera House; the
ecclesiastical council "counselled" them to remove the pavilion and
dispose of "the material in its construction;" they were threatened that
they would be "dropped" if they did not obey this "counsel;" and they
compromised by agreeing to pay twenty-five percent of the net earnings
of their pavilion into the Church's "stake treasury." In Monroe ward,
Sevier County, Utah, in 1901, a Mormon woman named Cora Birdsall had a
dispute with a man named James E. Leavitt about a title to land. Leavitt
went into the bishop's court and got a decision against her. She wrote
to President Joseph F. Smith for permission either to appeal the case
direct to him or "to go to law" in the matter; and Smith advised her
"to follow the order provided of the Lord to govern in your case." The
dispute was taken through the ecclesiastical courts and decided against
her. She refused to deed the land to Leavitt and she was excommunicated
by order of the High Council of the Sevier Stake of Zion. She became
insane as a result of this punishment, and her mother appealed to the
stake president to grant her some mitigation. He wrote, in reply: "Her
only relief will be in complying with President Smith's wishes. You say
she has never broken a rule of the Church. You forget that she has done
so by failing to abide by the decision of the mouthpiece of God." She
finally gave up a deed to the disputed land and was rebaptized in 1904.
(Letters of the First Presidency were, however, introduced to show that
it had been the policy of the presidency--particularly in President
Woodruff's day--not to interfere in disputes involving titles to land.)

It was testified that a Mormon merchant was expelled from the
Church, ostensibly for apostasy, but really because he engaged in the
manufacture of salt "against the interests of the President of the
Church and some of his associates;" that a Mormon Church official was
deposed "for distributing, at a school election, a ticket different from
that prescribed by the