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80 Four No Reversals The Rapid Rise of Judge McCarthy Charles McCarthy’s sons came of age on the Canadian prairie, but both boys completed their high-school education in Utah. Young Charles, his sister Marjorie recalled, “wanted business,” and so went on to train at the high school associated with the Latter-day Saints University, now LDS Business College. Wilson followed him and graduated in 1902, but his first love remained ranching. Before they completed their educations, however, both made the rite of passage for young Mormon men known as a mission . Charles was the first missionary called from the new town of Raymond. “Wilson stayed with the cattle,” Marjorie remembered. After Charles had been gone a year, Wilson was also called on a mission to Britain. Over the next decade, Wilson McCarthy would come of age, marry, complete his education, and launch his legal career. Just as his upbringing as a son of Mormon polygamists and a cowboy in a new country inevitably shaped his character, the decade between 1904 and 1914 helped forge the man he became. His experience preaching the Latter-day Saint gospel taught him principles of hard work and sacrifice, but it also provided a firsthand encounter with European culture and history. After completing his high-school education, McCarthy returned to his beloved life as a cowboy , but only briefly: he had fallen in love, and both he and his bride had set their sights higher than the hard life of ranching. He entered one of Canada’s finest law schools and completed his legal training at Columbia University, and set about making his mark on the world. Work, Work, Work: Mission to Scotland From the time Heber C. Kimball opened it in 1837, the British Mission had been a training ground for future Mormon leaders. By 1850, the mission had provided 42,316 converts to the struggling religion, drawn mostly No Reversals 81 from the impoverished working class but with a sprinkling of prosperous merchants. Almost seven thousand of them had immigrated to the United States. The announcement of polygamy in 1852 proved disastrous for LDS evangelists, but the British Isles provided an essential if diminishing stream of converts until the turn of the century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the nature of Mormon missionary work was undergoing a profound change. Rather than send out experienced heads of families, church authorities were now calling more young men and women to preach the gospel. The missionary experience had always been a rite of passage for young Latter-day Saint men, a test Brigham Young characterized as “a sort of probation—a kind of middle period between boyhood and manhood—a time which as you improve or neglect, will make or mar your future career.”242 With the fading of millennial expectations, missions everywhere now took on the added role of preparing both men and women for leadership positions in the LDS Church. As noted, LDS missionaries had a hard row to hoe in Great Britain, even among those they had converted. In March 1891, Charles McCarthy and his companion told their conference president “that Bro. Stuart had turned them out and desired to have his name taken off the records, that he had had enough of Mormonism that he wanted nothing more to do with it or the Church.”243 By the time the McCarthy brothers were called to Great Britain, opposition had led to organization against the religion in cities such as Bristol.244 In January 1899, Inez Knight described a confrontation with such an “anti mormon league,” which charged “that Mormon Elders came here for no other purpose than to entice women to Utah. & that they were slaves to the men & if they did not do as they told them their throats were cut. Gravel was thrown at the window & doors. We listened in peace until finally they left.”245 The McCarthy brothers served in Ireland and Scotland during the Reed Smoot hearings in the U.S. Senate, which helped fuel anti-Mormon sentiment . Future apostle Hugh B. Brown grew up at Spring Coulee and served in England at the same time. When he was sent to Cambridge, Brown recalled, his conference leader warned him his predecessors had been driven out of town at gunpoint, “and that they were told the next Mormon missionaries would be shot on sight.”246 Despite such opposition, more often than not, total indifference greeted the missionaries’ efforts. 242 Jessee, ed., Letters of Brigham Young to...

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