>>18420812, >>18420831, >>18420858, >>18420872 ALL LB
> Latter-day Saints / Udall family
The Romneys, Udalls, Flakes, and Pearces gathered in Apache County, Arizona, in the 1870s, when Brigham Young sought to open a corridor to Mexico.
ARIZONA’S SECRET HISTORY:
WHEN POWERFUL MORMONS WENT SEPARATE WAYS
The way Arizona Mormons remember their history, they were victims. They endured persecution and prevailed. From another perspective, they were aggressors.
In his 2004 book, Turnaround, Mitt Romney insists that despite emigrating to Mexico in 1884, “my great-grandfather [Miles Park Romney] never lost his love of country.” Romney, like other Mormons, sees his forebears as patriots despite persecution. The New York Times columnist David Brooks takes Romney’s ancestor veneration a notch further, arguing that Miles Romney’s experience of persecution—like that of all Mormons, as well as Jews—gave Mitt Romney “tenacious drive.”
Half-truth, meet your other half. To understand Mitt’s great-grandfather’s experiences and how they shaped Mitt, we need to look at Miles Romney’s milieu, something David Brooks hasn’t done. Was Miles Romney a patriot? Perhaps. To make that judgment without context, however, is to miss a more interesting story. That story concerns not just Miles Romney, but a whole bevy of Mormon politicos. Four families—the Romneys, the Udalls, the Flakes, and the Pearces, all prominent in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS)—have produced dynamos for both major parties. Their divergence, and perhaps their dynamism, can be tracked to the strange and bloody cauldron of frontier Arizona.
Let’s run down the list of politicians from those four families. George Romney was governor of Michigan and once ran for president. His son, Mitt, was governor of Massachusetts and is now running for president.
Levi Udall was the liberal chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court. One of Levi’s sons, Morris, became a U.S. congressman and ran for president. Another son, Stewart, served as Secretary of Interior. Morris’s son Mark, in turn, is a U.S. senator from Colorado. Stewart’s son Tom is a U.S. senator from New Mexico.
Jeff Flake, a U.S. congressman, is the frontrunner for a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona. His uncle, Jake, who died in 2008, was speaker of the Arizona House and a powerful state senator.
http://commonplace.online/article/arizonas-secret-history/