In Memoriam

B. CARMON HARDY

1934– 2006

Scholars and friends of history lost an esteemed colleague with the death of B. Carmon Hardy on December 21, 2016, three days short of his eighty-second birthday. Few historians have been as innovative, influential, and admired as Dr. Hardy, who did so much to expand and transform how we interpret the past.

Born in Vernal, Utah, to LaRue Mignon Hunting and Blaine C. Hardy in 1934, Carmon was a child of the Great Depression. He spent his first nine years in Utah and Arizona and graduated from high school in Wapato, Washington, in 1953. His father was a high school vocational agriculture teacher, so “most of my time and interest was taken up with various agricultural projects and activities in farm youth organizations,” he recalled. He worked on farms and ranches, serving as president of the Washington State Future Farmers of America before deciding late in his college career to major in history.

Carmon met his lifelong love, Kamillia Marlene Compton, at a costume ball in 1950. The couple wed on July 31, 1954, and became the parents of five children. After graduating from Washington State University in 1957, he received his master’s degree from Brigham Young University in 1959 and his doctorate from Wayne State University in 1963.

Dr. Hardy launched his academic career in 1961 as an assistant professor at Brigham Young University. Beginning in 1966, he served for more than fifty years at California State University, Fullerton as a professor of history, department chair, and professor emeritus. He was a masterful writer and compelling lecturer. Carmon dedicated his extraordinary gifts to expanding his students’ worlds. The timbre and cadence of his gentle, quiet voice could command the attention of any audience. He received California State University’s Meritorious Performance Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1988 and the History Students’ Association Award for Outstanding Mentoring of Students in 2002. Carmon inspired thousands of students throughout his teaching career. His ten grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren recall how his historical storytelling kept them spellbound.

Professor Hardy’s scholarship knew no borders. He wrote a textbook on world history and articles about the Emperor Julian, historiography, and the United States Constitution. Carmon published articles on the Third Amendment, which banned the quartering of soldiers in private homes, and the Fourth Amendment, which protects American citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures: more than forty years ago he developed cogent arguments about the American right to privacy, anticipating contemporary scholarly debates.

Carmon’s work often drew on his Utah roots. He began his groundbreaking work on Mormon settlements in Mexico with his dissertation, “The Northern Colonies in Northern Mexico, A History, 1885–1912”; he went on to help Nelle Spilsbury Hatch preserve the heritage of Utah families who established prosperous Mexican settlements at Colonia Dublán, Nuevo Casas Grandes, and Colonia Juárez in the face of enormous hardship. No one has surpassed his 1969 article “The Trek South: How the Mormons Went to Mexico,” published in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. His 1980 article with Victor Jorgensen, “The Taylor- Cowley Affair and the Watershed of Mormon History,” launched the revolution in scholarship about post-Manifesto polygamy and official Mormon church support of plural marriage after 1890. His masterful Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage won the Mormon Historical Association’s Best Book award for 1992. Kathryn M. Daynes of Brigham Young University called his 2007 documentary history, Doing the Works of Abraham: Mormon Polygamy: Its Origin, Practice, and Demise, “a treasure trove both for scholars and casual readers, a model of scholarship that unfolds a compelling story.” 1

After receiving an MA in 1987, Kamillia pursued a career in art, presenting shows and teaching courses in drawing, monotypes, and pastels, most recently at Santa Ana College. During their semi-retirement, the couple visited Europe, where Carmon presented a keynote address to an international audience. An engaging, eloquent, and compassionate writer, Carmon took a sympathetic view of humanity. His 2008 article, “Polygamy, Mormonism, and Me,” shows how he did his best to deal with Mormon subjects “as accurately and fairly as possible, placing all under the same lamp as I would if recounting a military exploit of the American Civil War or the policies of a medieval Catholic pope.” He remained “proud that my Mormon forebears walked across the continent, broke their plows subduing the saltcrusted plain, fought the crickets, and raised up cities in the dry valleys of the Rocky Mountains. If I now disagree with some of their precepts, I yet hope to emulate their courage in setting a different course, in honoring my own deepest convictions.” 2

Professor Hardy was a Fellow of the Utah State Historical Society, which awarded him its Dale Morgan Prize in 1980 and the Smith-Pettit Foundation Best Documentary Book in Utah History Award in 2008. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought honored him with its Best Article Award in 1991. His last major work was a privately published memoir, “Return to Uruk: Life’s Journey.” Carmon’s many friends will miss his gentle manner, honesty, integrity, and courage. We will all benefit from the enduring legacy of this great writer and scholar, son of Utah, and citizen of the world.

Will Bagley and Michael W. Homer—

Notes

1. Kathryn M. Daynes, review of Mormon Polygamy: Its Origin, Practice, and Demise by B. Carmon Hardy, BYU Studies Quarterly 48, no. 2 (2009): 178.

2. B. Carmon Hardy, “Polygamy, Mormonism, and Me,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 41, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 99, 100.