Perhaps the two best-known things about Mitt Romney are that he is a Mormon and that he made a lot of money as a venture capitalist. Since both of these facts present certain liabilities in US politics, his campaign for the White House has tried to make known that the potency of his American nationalism overpowers both his fortune and his faith. It is less well known that Mormonism has a complex history with both American capitalism and American nationalism.
The Mormon prophet Joseph Smith’s family epitomised the displacement that capitalism brought to rural America. In five generations in the New World, beginning in the 1630s, the Smiths lost their membership in the Congregational Church, a bit of capital in a failed investment in the China trade, and their land. Between the 1790s and 1816, in an unsuccessful attempt to maintain the family’s status as landowners, Smith’s grandfather and father migrated from Massachusetts to Vermont to upstate New York. In 1830, when Smith organised his church, his father, Joseph Smith Sr, found himself, at 58 years old, a landless farmer, a fall in status which in modern rural societies is almost impossible to reverse.
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