Conference Report

Conference Report, 1897–1941

Forty-five years of general conference, printed in full: every address, every sustaining, every piece of business. The generation of leaders it records is almost unsearchable anywhere else.

What it is

Conference Report is the official published proceedings of the general conferences of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Each volume prints a conference nearly verbatim — the addresses in full, the sustaining of officers, the statistical and financial reports, and the ordinary business of a church conducting itself in public twice a year.

The church's own website carries general conference addresses back to 1971. Everything before that is the gap this volume fills, and for 1897 to 1941 the Conference Report is not merely the best record — it is the record.

Why these particular years matter

The run opens seven years after the 1890 Manifesto and closes on the eve of American entry into the Second World War. Between those points the church stopped practising plural marriage in earnest, survived the Reed Smoot hearings, watched Utah become an ordinary American state, built a welfare programme through the Depression, and passed from leaders born in Nauvoo to leaders born in the Salt Lake Valley.

All of that is argued out from the pulpit here, twice a year, in front of the membership. It is a remarkably direct record of a church reinventing itself in public.

What we hold

45 conferences from 1897 to 1941, comprising 2,465 addresses and items, with 572 named speakers.

The long tail is the real find. Beyond the presidencies and the Twelve, hundreds of Seventies, bishops, mission presidents and auxiliary officers spoke once or twice and were printed in full. For many of them these pages are the only extended record of what they thought.

What they talked about