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Placing Juanita Brooks Among the Heroes [or Villains] of Mormon and Utah History
Placing Juanita Brooks among the Heroes (or Villains) of Mormon and Utah History
BY RICHARD L. SAUNDERS
Juanita Brooks is an iconic figure of Utah and Mormon history, one often discussed in superlatives. Her fellow writers and scholars, as well as the discerning public, have publicly referred to her as a hero. Bill Mulder called her “at once representative and singular.” Others have called her “fearless,” a “faithful transgressor,” and “a credible hero.” Perhaps the highest praise was paid her by fellow writer and semiprofessional curmudgeon Charles Kelly, when he said of her with grudging praise, “She has a lot of guts for a Mormon.” 1
Lauding heroes is good form in public. In Brooks’s case, praising her literary heroism expresses a deep regard for Brooks as a public figure and her importance to the craft she pursued. I notice, however, that as time passes praise is heaped on Brooks often because she is a notable figure. She has become a measure by which other writers are measured. As a writer or historical actor, Brooks is more iconic or emblematic than she is directly influential. Brooks certainly provides a local face (and an early female face) to a much larger set of changing realities, yet she trained no graduate students, instead teaching English composition (not history) to junior college students. She produced one work of monumental importance—but I will explain later how deeply indebted that work was to her mentor. Brooks lived her life as a committed but avocational chronicler and storyteller, one who began writing with a massive sense of inferiority in an isolated desert town, but she did not write or publish in a vacuum, so if we are to understand Brooks as a hero, we have to look at her in the context of the world she inhabited.
Calling Brooks a heroic writer leaves us with the question of why she is considered heroic and not merely a writer. More attention has been paid to praising Brooks than to understanding why she holds place in scholarship, what Brooks means to history, and just exactly why terms like heroic are used to describe her. Heroes are formed, shaped, and emerge from within conflict, so calling Brooks a hero or heroic writer implies that she fits within a story of conflict. But what was the conflict? Maybe the question is clearer if I ask it this way: What makes Brooks a heroic writer in terms of the writing of her time and within her culture?
Let me give you the answer right up front, and then I will give you the explanation for it. Brooks became a “heroic writer” within Western and LDS historiography by being an early pioneer of a new path through historical narrative of her regional culture. She was one of several visible characters of her time who took a different approach to telling the past, one that collided with Utah’s received wisdom or cultural “master narrative,” the inspiring pioneer myth. 2 Before and after the Second World War, as Brooks was cutting her teeth in the practice of history, the Latter-day Saints’ collective psyche experienced a subtle but powerful challenge as the church’s well-entrenched inspirational narrative collided with a small group of writers (Brooks among them) whose influence turned out to be much larger than their body of work. The slow interaction between historical viewpoints forcibly injected a new perspective and new practices into discussions of Latter-day Saint history. Basically, there was a high-level argument about what history is, how it draws upon evidence, and how it functions within the culture. This article is about that contest. It is an exercise in historiology rather than historiography. If historiology is not large or known well enough to be called a branch of philosophy, it can at least be identified as a twiglike offshoot. 3 Historiology looks at how the past is understood, the social functions of history, and the social epistemology or concept about what in the past is knowable and what constitutes “evidence.” All these elements shape what is possible to lay before viewers and readers in the present and thus tell us what history is.
I will start (like any historian has to) by setting some limits and boundaries, and to do that I have to extract a snippet out of the timeline of the much larger history of Mormonism. We talk about timelines as if time exists with beginnings and ends, but life is not really lived in a line. The historian’s beginning and end points in both time and in circumstance are necessary choices, because no book or article has a limitless page count or is exhaustively inclusive. 4 Beginnings and ends help us make sense of a story, trimming it to manageable size and giving it an outline and context. I will choose 1935 to 1950, fixing attention conveniently on the fifteen years during which Brooks received the only real training she had to write history. Focusing on this snippet of time will also help me answer why she is looked on as a “heroic writer.” Because she existed in space as well as time, I also put a pin onto a map at Utah and its Latter-day Saint culture generally. All that these pins do is give us a set of boundaries within which to work. I do not want to imply that my title character created the modern form of Utah and Mormon history. All I am doing is pinning down both a place and a time, trying to figure out how Brooks fits into it. She becomes a lens through which to study what is going on inside our box, across time and culture.
Prior to 1935, Brooks was a rural housewife and teacher who wanted to be a creative writer, planted in a small desert town of the American West and the Mormon Corridor. She did not start as a historian or even as a writer of history (actually, she was an English professor teaching basic writing at a junior college), but found she was comfortable telling stories about the desert and people around her. In 1933, Nels Anderson, a Dixie Academy graduate and Columbia University-educated sociologist, was doing field research in St. George for a study of rural Mormon life. He knew the Brookses and eventually asked Juanita to write a personal account of her grandfather’s polygamous family. 5 He returned east and landed an executive position on the National Labor Relations Board, just as the National Recovery Act began creating projects to provide a few of the unemployed rural Americans with meaningful work during the Great Depression. Anderson asked Brooks to start up and manage a southern Utah branch of the Emergency Relief Administration (ERA). 6 Thus, Brooks began her involvement with the practice of history as a documentary transcriptionist. She set up a table and bank of typewriters in a back room of her own house, where between November 1934 and June 1935 a dozen local women transcribed diaries and similar records that Brooks gleaned from the bureau drawers and trunks of families around the area. Once the project was complete, deposit carbon copies of the southern Utah transcripts ended up in the hands of a new agency in Ogden, the Historical Records Survey (HRS). There they languished in the HRS files. Three years later, the HRS hired a young man fresh out of the University of Utah, Dale Morgan, as the project editor/publicist and, later, its historical writer. Morgan came across the southern Utah transcriptions as he reorganized the project’s research files and began corresponding with Brooks in July 1939. After nearly two years of correspondence, the pair met for the first time in January 1941. 7
Except among scholars, Morgan does not have Brooks’s name recognition. He is not remembered as the major influence on Utah or Mormon historiography that he was, but he was the defining influence on Brooks as her teacher, mentor, confidant, and an important supply line of sources and expertise during her formative years as a historian. Brooks would not likely have become important as a writer except for Morgan’s training and influence.
Morgan was born and raised in Salt Lake City. He and Brooks shared an experience in early family loss: Brooks of her first husband and Morgan of his father while still a child. Morgan also sustained another defining personal loss. At age fourteen, a bacterial meningitis infection completely robbed him of his hearing. Through his high school, college, and entire adult life, he was completely deaf. Typewriters became his voice. Morgan planned for a career in advertising, but his job with the HRS in August 1938 introduced him to the pursuit of history. As early as October 1938, despite being fresh out of college and new to the field, Morgan thought little of Utah and Mormon scholarship of the time, calling it “[p]ractically nothing really worth while.” 8 Morgan set himself a personal task to write the history of Utah and then of Mormonism. The tasks of focused research and succinct writing in the HRS kindled in him a passion for factual accuracy and a quest for comprehensive completeness. He used both to publish one of the earliest examples of a modern historical study of Utah. 9 Morgan possessed a remarkable memory, cultivated a flair for writing, and depended almost exclusively on notes, letters, and memos for his interaction with most people. Brooks learned she could trust his observations and criticisms, and he was faultlessly generous sharing source material with her. Morgan drew Brooks into a loose constellation of Utah’s expatriate writers. Besides Morgan and Brooks, the circle’s key members included Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and Fawn Brodie. Around Brooks and other writers also circulated the novelist Maurine Whipple, the researcher Stanley Ivins, and the aforementioned Nels Anderson. Each of these people and their relationships to Brooks belong in the broad context of history that I will discuss later. The relationships and influences within this group are too complicated to tease out in the limited space here, so I will concentrate on the interaction of Brooks and Morgan, who discovered in each other a kindred spirit dedicated to factuality, fairness, and truth. Before 1941, each discovered their correspondent also wanted to write about one culturally untouchable subject, the Mountain Meadows Massacre. 10 The development of Brooks’s Mountain Meadows Massacre is a useful lens through which to see their interaction, since it fits neatly into our snippet of timeline.
Brooks came to her subject independently, well before encountering Morgan. The historian Gary Topping points out that Brooks was an insider to her subject, bringing to it two invaluable qualities: first, being a local, with a local’s access to material that would surely have been denied to anyone outside her community; second, being an insider, with an insider’s comprehension of the rural community and the values which drove it. 11 As a St. George resident, Brooks was personally interested in the Mountain Meadows Massacre because it was an unspoken reality all around her. Brooks knew personally at least one man implicated in the massacre, Nephi Johnson. Brooks had discovered two crucial firsthand massacre documents in 1936 and 1937. In 1940, she made a preliminary presentation to the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters based on those documents. 12 The massacre story suffused the Jacob Hamblin biography she wished to write. The problem was, she did not yet know how to take on the Massacre single-handedly, demonstrating what was provable and dismissing that which was not. Her first publications had been essays—magazine stories about her small-town place and time written for a general American readership. She told stories well, but so much folklore, fear, family patriotism, and emotion were tangled among the narrative threads that merely recounting the massacre as a story was culturally perilous.
Brooks and Morgan certainly must have discussed their common interest at their first meeting in January 1941, but if not, she openly confessed her desire and sent Morgan a magazine article draft in the summer of 1942. 13 He responded to her draft a full year later. The subject was too large and convoluted for an article, he thought, and suggested she think about the work in monograph length. As part of his critique, Morgan generated for her a detailed research outline, a list of facts she must document and argumentative points she needed to settle before being properly prepared to write, and he suggested again that her topic was too large for an article. 14 “You suggest a monograph,” Brooks replied, “I’m ashamed to admit that I’m not sure that I know what a monograph is.” 15 Morgan explained that her narrative would be better presented as a book. Not yet confident in her writing ability or grasp of the massacre as a historical subject, Brooks followed Morgan’s outline scrupulously and set to work enlarging, trimming, and documenting a work of research for the first time in her life. Nearly three years later, she sent Morgan a much longer but very rough draft manuscript. He returned a heavily marked-up copy that focused chiefly on historical details and documentation in the sources, some of which he had ignored in earlier drafts. 16 More importantly, he introduced Brooks to the basics of manuscript preparation (such details as margins and note citations). Over two more years and many more letters to and from her mentor, she learned about bias, innuendo, weighing evidence, the importance of documentation, and the elements of an historical approach—though she
would not have called it that. The process changed her writing about the massacre from storytelling to historical narrative; she gave up the informality and pathos of storytelling, adding citations to her sources of information, shaping the story in terms of what could be documented or reasonably concluded, and assuming a straightforward, dispassionate view of actors and victims. Morgan provided more than half of the sources she quoted and cited, virtually everything unearthed from contemporary newspapers and everything from federal archives. 17 He reviewed and commented on the manuscript for a fourth time in June 1948, and at that point it was he (not the author) who approached first Wallace Stegner and then Stanford University Press to assess their interest in its publication. 18 It is not the slightest bit of exaggeration to say that The Mountain Meadows Massacre would not have come into being had it not been for Morgan. As the book was going to press, Morgan recommended Brooks and her growing capability to the Utah State Historical Society. She was appointed to the Board of Control in 1949 and became his voice on it, pushing for creation of a publicly available research collection and real rigor in its publications. 19
This story of Brooks and Morgan and The Mountain Meadows Massacre exists at the level of microhistory—history on an individual or community level. On an interpersonal level, Brooks and Morgan encountered each other at a time when Brooks needed development, encouragement, and insight to develop as a historian. Morgan needed someone within the state and its dominant religious culture who shared his perspective about historical realities—a brave and capable peer to encourage. She was nearly old enough to be his mother, but he was the more developed researcher and writer. Brooks had the disposition and latent ability to write the great book that The Mountain Meadows Massacre is, but she would not likely have written it without her mentor. Alone of her work, Massacre has the ballast of substantive citations. None of her other works are documented nearly so well, and many have virtually no context or documentation beyond a general bibliography. 20 It robs her of no credit to say that as a writer of history, Brooks was chiefly a chronicler and storyteller, not a researcher. In 1971, Brooks herself wrote Morgan that “I can hardly claim to be an historian. You were right when you said my area is folklore.” 21
Inside cover of Brooks’s The Mountain Meadows Massacre, inscribed to Morgan. Morgan was utterly unsentimental about the physical condition of his working library, habitually cross-reading his personal transcripts or Photostats of original documents against published versions and marking corrections heavily. Though he had been heavily involved in developing this volume and despite this copy being inscribed to him by the author as a personal friend, he carefully read, corrected, and questioned the text with his penciled markings and notes.
Her book was a remarkable accomplishment, but at the level of microhistory all we can do is assert that it is a remarkable accomplishment. To go back to the first question, to understand why Brooks is a hero and her book The Mountain Meadows Massacre is important, we have to look at the book and its writer (and its godfather) in a broader context—what made the book significant in terms of the time in which it was produced, and what set its author on the path toward hero status. That involves a broader level of inquiry: macrohistory.
To understand why Brooks has been widely described as a “fearless” or “heroic” writer requires that we see her work within the place and time it was written. To see her work properly requires three bits of context. The first context is that at the time she began writing in the 1940s, the fields of Utah and Mormon history were inextricably intertwined. Writing about one necessarily involved the other (unless one was writing about branches of Mormonism beyond the Utah tradition). Mormon history is no longer Utah history, but it was often treated as one and the same when Brooks was learning her craft.
The second context emerges from a short comment by Swedish scholar Moses Rischin. In 1969, Rischin published a short essay pointing to a perceived change in Mormon historiography, calling it “the new Mormon history.” 22 Rischin pointed to Thomas O’Dea’s sociological study, The Mormons (1957), as the origination point for the New Mormon History, followed immediately by Arrington’s Great Basin Kingdom. He also mentioned the 1965 founding of the Mormon History Association and the commencement of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Later scholars proposed that the change in Mormon history Rischin identified resulted from the emergence of professionally trained historians from within Mormon culture. 23 I am not so sure, because something was going on years earlier, and both Morgan and Brooks were in the thick of it. Like most changes, it had precursors and antecedents and was not clear-cut, but I think it can be seen in the kinds of books published within the timeline snippet I have established (see the Appendix, p. 233). I suggest that this earlier period of conflict smoothed the way for the rise of academic scholarship on Mormonism.
The third bit of context is more like a chunk and involves some understanding of how history was written and distributed in Utah when Brooks began writing, of how Brooks’s first important work, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, fit into the formal practice of history writing at the time. To understand why Brooks was a “fearless” or “heroic” writer, one has to understand when she lived and what about writing history might have made her heroic in comparison. She has to be “heroic” in terms of the telling of Utah and Mormon history in her time.
Until nearly the 1960s, Utah’s history, like the history of most western states, was not really a field of its own, and no one outside Utah was terribly interested in Mormons or Mormon history beyond a certain sensationalism. Most Utah history was written either for schoolchildren, for local citizens and family descendants, or for those interested in preserving the past for its own sake. With few exceptions, Mormon history was generally written by Mormons for Mormons. In Utah, history was almost an outgrowth of LDS church authority, the venue of such encyclopedists as Andrew Jenson, such Romantic compilers and analysts as B. H. Roberts, and such doctrinarians as Joseph Fielding
Smith. There was little unofficial Utah or Mormon history written or marketed. 24 At the same time, there was a small but thriving culture of local and family history publications, especially with the church and state’s pioneer founders a generation gone. Aside from the Utah Historical Quarterly, the major publications were Daughters of Utah Pioneers (DUP) lesson series. Utah was not unique by any measure; state and local historical journals across the country had presented the edited records of founders and pioneers for about fifty years by 1935. Such publications were fueled by a healthy strain of antiquarianism, or the study of the past for its own sake as an artifact. Publication was textual preservation, primary works were often reprinted without comment. Memoirs and biographies appeared regularly as family publications, and often included segments of diaries. Church leaders were afforded larger biographies. The important point is that history (except for outright polemic) was generally written largely by Utah’s Latter-day Saints for Utah’s Latter-day Saints (or by those outside the church specifically to challenge or document a competing narrative). This was history in terms of the pioneer myth “master narrative”: stories told and books written to congratulate the living on their heritage, partly to gild the founders, and certainly to reinforce values and views. 25 One writer once observed privately that the Mormons had never adopted Scottish poet Robert Burns’s invocation, “O, would some Power the gift give us to see ourselves as others see us,” but rather “Oh, would someone give the world to see us as we see ourselves.” 26 An important problem with all this storytelling was that it was done chiefly by assertion and the source material was chiefly personal narrative. Very rarely did anyone really explore very far to see how contemporary records compared. The single library in Utah with a substantive and available book collection was the Salt Lake Public Library. 27
By the 1930s, whether intended or not, the telling of the Latter-day Saint story had become closely entangled with church doctrine in the minds of key writers of Utah’s story, and an attack on one was, by point of argument, necessarily an attack on the other. Histories tended to be produced in terms of church leaders’ lives and their agency in the past, and were often written by well-placed younger leaders. The generation of firsthand witnesses to the church’s founding and the state’s settlement was long gone, and access to firsthand written source material was dramatically limited. As a result, official histories, such as the semi-official History of the Church of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1902–1912), were both source material and explanation. Doctrinal histories, such as Joseph Fielding Smith Jr.’s Origin of the Reorganized Church (1907) and Essentials in Church History (1922), were openly polemic, but because their writers tended to write both doctrine and history and argued about doctrine from a historical perspective, they did not separate for readers the assertive claims of doctrine from the common temporal realities that could have been merely factual. Levi Edgar Young discontinued his doctoral dissertation on polygamy and did not complete his degree in history because he “could not accept” the reality of things he encountered in his research. 28 In 1947, DUP president Kate Carter addressed a BYU faculty group on the subject of source material. “When she talked of ‘editing’ journals, one of the audience . . . asked specifically what it was that she called ‘editing.’ She explained that she omitted material that seemed not important or that was repetitious and then said, ‘I never allow anything to go into print that I think will be injurious to my church, or that will in any way reflect discredit upon our pioneers. I hope that if I ever do, I shall lose my position and my power to do so.’” 29 This was history by ethical expediency.
Writers and historians who wrote Utah and Mormon history in the inspirational master narrative style, exhibiting ethicism. Clockwise from upper left: Kate Carter (center), Leland Creer, Howard Driggs, Preston Nibley (far right), Joseph Fielding Smith, Levi Edgar Young. All photos from Utah State Historical Society.
Everything in the budding cultural collision was on hold during the Second World War, which ended with the heady “triumph of democracy.” On the war’s heels came the 1947 Utah Pioneer Centennial. A desire to celebrate and memorialize the past provided little room to question it. 30 Crawford Gates’s Promised Valley pageant sang paeans to the Utah pioneers. Preston Nibley edited a collection of Faith Promoting Stories (1943) of the pioneer generation. J. Reuben Clark’s October 1947 general conference address, published immediately as To Them of the Last Wagon, capped the process, drawing the lowliest into the pantheon of “blessed, honored Pioneers!” 31 Clark’s emotional appeal sat alongside Ida Alldredge’s zealous laud of the pioneer forebears, “They, The Builders of the Nation,” a hymn praising the founders’ character and quality: “every day some burden lifted, every day some heart to cheer, every day some hope the brighter.” 32 Really? Every day? Alldredge’s lyric ignored personal struggles, doubts, arguments, and failures, to gild the entire founding generation and put them high overhead on a very tall cultural pedestal. Clark’s respect for those who had suffered along the overland trail is no less sincere for its stentorian eloquence, but its message also carried a submessage, one that may or may not have been purposefully invoked: that Latter-day Saint history should hold out a clear, noble, inspired and inspiring example of the past—the veritable staff on which floated aloft an “ensign to the nations.” The underlying message was for those in the present to look to the faithfulness and nobility of those in the past as their example in building the future.
History as a romantic, ethical story drives this Utah & Idaho Sugar Company float in the Utah Centennial parade, 1947. Notice that the woman is portrayed as teaching a group of children at her feet, gesturing toward the rendition of the miracle of the gulls on the back of the float. The lesson is clear: the young generation should look to the past for inspiration in the way they approach their own challenges. Utah State Historical Society, photo no. 1392.
At the time Brooks was researching and writing on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and even after her book was published, Latter-day Saint culture held clearly established ideas about how the past should be regarded and how it was appropriately used within the church’s culture of belief and participation. As late as the 1920s, key writers among the Latter-day Saints were used to thinking of history and the present understanding of the past as both a mortal manifestation of revealed truth and the enactment of that truth. History became a form of uncanonized scripture; challenging accepted history was an assault on both God’s word and church leaders’ testimony. When the HRS began poking around uncomfortably in the state’s local past, new sources and questions surfaced that challenged the “master narrative,” making some people uncomfortable. Maurice Howe wrote a friend about his experience starting Utah’s branch of the HRS in 1935, stating that “LDS historians were jealous of our work at first because they thought we were trespassing in their fields.” 33 The Mormon story was proprietary. In 1949, an Ogden newspaper editor observed to Morgan that “We Utahns certainly like to read about Utah history—provided it reads like we think it should.” 34 As Brooks’s interest awakened in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a popular desire to memorialize the founders sparked many family publications that claimed a place for their grandfather or grandmother within the founding stories of the church, the settlement of Utah, or of a particular locality.
That Romantic, patriotic, inspirational, culturally affirming history is one side of the equation. What could possibly be a problem with that approach if it works for readers? Well, what happens when a new set of facts seem to contradict or question the stories of established tradition? That was a perceived problem for the affirming history of Mormonism between 1935 and 1950. I am not talking about academic scholarship. Scholarship involving the Mormons cropped up occasionally, but mostly in the form of masters’ theses and dissertations read by few besides the candidate’s graduate committee. A few of these made it to print, including Ephraim E. Eriksen’s Psychological and Ethical Aspects of Mormon Group Life (1922) and Joseph A. Geddes’s The United Order among the Mormons (Missouri Phase): An Unfinished Experiment in Economic Organization (1922). My grandfather completed his PhD in sociology in 1936 at the University of Wisconsin with a dissertation on social perceptions and adherence to the church’s health standard. Despite the subject, he made an international career in rural sociology, not the Mormons. A few people read scholarship, but it was not many; such work written about the Mormons was generally unread even among Mormon academics. 35 That began to change during our snippet of timeline. Since academic scholarship was not very influential (or upsetting), I will focus here on two important factors that were. One was the activity of a new generation of Utah-born writers who lived and worked outside the state and were willing and able to put their culture onto a national stage—that expatriate constellation mentioned earlier. Another was the archives and writing projects of the New Deal. I will talk through the latter first.
Brooks’s transcription project and Morgan’s HRS historical work both challenged the traditional forms of Utah and Mormon history, which often focused on founding figures and political institutions. The Depression discredited the country’s industrial and political barons of the Gilded Age and motivated a quest for a new approach to the nation’s history. The federal culture projects found it in a new historical approach that came from Britain: documentary. 36 “Documentary,” wrote historian William Stott, “deals with people ‘a damn sight realer’ than the celebrities that crowd the media.” Influenced by the work of photographers Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis, documentary focused on the experiences and records of nonelite populations. Early forms of documentary emphasized common people, work routines, and daily life, requiring an entirely new set of source materials. 37 The previously available memoirs and writings of community and business leaders—the basis of traditional history—were only marginally significant compared to the diaries, letters, and memoirs of those who had been nothing more than followers and common citizens. This approach to history shifted the perspective about “what really happened” away from elite figures and onto the often-conflicting experiences of everyone else. It influenced the telling of Utah history as well. “Mormonism really was compounded out of the lives of hundreds and thousands,” Morgan wrote to Bernard DeVoto in 1942, referring to the diary of a man otherwise unknown to Mormon or Utah history. “There is more to Mormonism than the lives of Brigham Young and Joseph Smith.” 38 Importantly, bringing up the differing perspectives of documentary often challenged or at least complicated official stories all across the country, not just in Utah or among the Mormons. 39 But within Utah, dredging up new records from people with very different and sometimes conflicting experiences challenged the master narrative, what I have termed the pioneer myth. By the end of the war, the documentary approach proved powerful enough that it began reshaping American memory. 40
Now for a hard example of the collision. At about the same time that Morgan and Brooks began corresponding, a young woman from Huntsville, Utah, and another University of Utah graduate, Fawn McKay, a niece of First Presidency member David O. McKay, quietly surrendered her family faith and determined to embark on a biography of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith. She met both DeVoto and Morgan, was influenced by their thinking, and became a close friend of the latter, drawing on him for source material and editorial advice. Between 1940 and 1944, Fawn McKay Brodie mined resources from outside Latter-day Saint history and records. In 1943, her proposal won the Biography Fellowship offered by New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf. In 1945, her biography No Man Knows My History appeared, a volume that has not since been out of print. The social history revolution of the 1960s and 1970s shook the ivory tower of American academia over years and across many venues; Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith compressed a similar challenge to traditional Mormon history into a single, explosive shockwave.
The great challenge to Latter-day Saint psyche posed by No Man Knows My History and a few years later by The Mountain Meadows Massacre—and the potential threat that Morgan’s own work on the Mormons represented—was less in the writers’ interpretations (which could be dismissed), but rather that those interpretations rested on a body of largely unimpeachable contemporary documentation. It was difficult to get around the issue that in these new works were presented a set of documents that told an entirely different history to the one so long accepted by church members. Here is where the conflict came into the open: rather than simply accepting the old history as a settled reality—a canon—these new researchers began dredging up new evidence, new sources, and brought new questions asked of the well-established facts. All of a sudden, the accepted stories in the master narrative began looking a bit threadbare, privileging some evidence or sources while gliding past, omitting, or ignoring others. To many, Mormonism’s inspirational story became much more human and much less inspiring.
Defenders among the Latter-day Saints knew how to handle ill-informed detractors and sensationalists (they had done so effectively for two generations), but they were unprepared for the assault of source material that appeared in Anderson’s and Brodie’s work. The biography’s reviewer in the Saturday Review of Literature captured the ethical view of Joseph Smith:
The Latter-day Saints’ faith-affirming accounts and personal testimonies were quickly becoming no longer the only facts. First Anderson, then Brodie, and then the others began pulling handfuls of new evidence out of reemerging documents that challenged the comfortable old ones. Fr. Robert Dwyer, who received a PhD in history in 1941, addressed an important point that defined the collision described here: what does one side do when the other side simply dismisses an assertion and uses another standard to measure a claim? 42 How could the Mormons argue against a factual context for their history? For those inside a culture, the most direct method is by denial and denunciation— dismissing the dismissal. Yes, of course there was a backlash. J. Reuben Clark, Joseph Fielding Smith, Milton R. Hunter, Levi Edgar Young, and Kate Carter all challenged the uncomfortable new questions by reasserting the nobility of the past and questioning the motives of those who did not accept their versions of history. 43
Once the issue (and questions) of document-based, contradictory narratives was in the open, it could not be tucked back where it came from. There were, these new scholars would argue, perfectly natural explanations for claims of visions, dreams, or other communications. In other words, the key argument was that Joseph Smith and the Mormons existed within history, and their experiences had to exist within historical limits as well. These new writers on Mormonism all looked trustingly to the social sciences to help them revisit the past in terms of proliferating new and rediscovered contemporary documentation.
Now let’s go back to the writers of this new strain of history. This first generation—Brodie,
Brooks, Morgan, DeVoto, Stegner, and Anderson—were also writers that fit within what Edward Geary once called more broadly “Mormondom’s Lost Generation.” 44 They were lost in the sense that they had strayed not just from Mormonism (neither Stegner nor DeVoto were ever church members) but from the security of Utah’s mountain fastness and the state’s cultural insulation. It is important to note that all of them published or planned to publish their works outside of Utah for non-Mormon readers. Brooks’s Massacre set an intensely local event and its aftermath within the contexts of regional and national conflicts. This was history which intended to explain, not to inspire. Similarly, each writer in her loose circle approached the Mormon story as one facet of a broader American story rather than a sui generis, self-existent story of the Restoration (Mormons’ term for the reestablishment of the early Christian church by Joseph Smith in 1830).
Brooks was one of this new group. To bring this back to her specifically, I think it fair to observe that Brooks has been called a “heroic writer” from two directions. First, from outside Mormonism looking in, chiefly because she was willing to bridge gaps in her chosen slice of history inclusively with documented fact, challenging the omissions of faith-promoting narratives. Second, from inside Mormonism (as stated now, not during her early career), in that Brooks “voic[ed] her contrary opinions unequivocally” with the courage of not only conviction, but the moral rightness of factual inclusivity. Whether she actually said that “Nothing less than the whole, unvarnished truth is good enough for the church I belong to,” as has been attributed to her, she insisted on bringing cold, hard, and occasionally disturbing fact to Mormon history. To Brooks this meant facing up to uncomfortable historical realities, stripping away the inspirational varnish and filling in the omissions of faith-promoting narratives. In the context of her time and culture, that was a bold, new, and somewhat risky assertion or stance to take—but one that would emerge as an article of faith within the New Mormon History. 45 Morgan summed up the value of her work as The Mountain Meadows Massacre came from the press:
The point of view it expresses in the long run is the point of view that must prevail about the whole of Mormon history. Nothing the leaders of the Church may do, regardless of prejudice, resistance to change, or vested interest can prevent this. Your book will serve to shape, even as it now expresses, the social force that will bring it about. In time to come, the pioneer value of your book will be entirely appreciated[. F]ear not. 46
Writers and historians who rejected the inspirational master narrative of Utah and Mormon histories, exhibiting instead historicism. Clockwise from upper left: Juanita Brooks, Fawn Brodie, Bernard DeVoto, Robert Dwyer, Dale Morgan (left), Wallace Stegner. All photos from Utah State Historical Society.
Let me return to my thesis and hypothesis and see where we stand. Hopefully, you can now see how Brooks fits into the writing of her time, a participant in the uncomfortable encounter between practitioners of the pioneer myth as Latter-day Saint master narrative on the one hand, and a small number of writers wielding a new approach to Utah and Mormon history on the other. Brooks was virtually the first writer within Utah’s Latter-day Saint culture to challenge inspirational master narrative versions of history in print. With the guidance and substantial reinforcement from Morgan, she constructed her breakthrough study, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, on a foundation of factual inclusivity, without either apology or direct condemnation of the principals. 47 Brooks’s nature and disposition were to tell the truth as best she could from contemporary documentation. Those who have called Brooks fearless and heroic were her contemporaries and those in succeeding generations who side with the goals and premises of this new history. Those among Utah’s community and Latter-day Saint culture who placed a greater value on the inspirational message of history expressed different views of her enquiry (and of works like it). 48 Among Brooks’s patriotic generation, the challenge of an uninspirational history was upsetting to some and frustrating to others. The collision between these two viewpoints—of what history was and what it should be—was expressed in a slow swirl of emotions, values, assertions, and trust—precisely how humans negotiate conflicting values in the face of change. From the 1930s through the early 1960s, the formal discussion about the Mormon past in books and in journal and magazine articles plowed the cultural ground from which could grow the “new Mormon history” that Moses Rischin identified.
This inscription is the author’s most straightforward explanation of her motivation for writing The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Though this inscription is undated and does not specify the recipient, another inscription identifies this book as the one presented to the LDS apostle Delbert L. Stapley at his meeting with Brooks on June 13, 1961. Convinced that both the massacre and the church’s recent action posthumously restoring Lee to fellowship should remain ignored, sparing the church either publicity or scrutiny for an indefensible act by a few of its members, Stapley insisted that her forthcoming biography of John D. Lee include no indication of Lee’s reinstatement.
Let me address my own thesis and hypothesis by asserting that there is no single, unassailable body of usable facts, no single past, and no single history. Religiously and culturally useful views of the past do not (or possibly should not) involve choosing either one side or the other. History is neither a binary of mutually exclusive “faithful” or “skeptical” studies, nor of “true” and “untrue” facts, nor either of “fair” and “unfair” or “biased” and “objective” approaches—though histories may be each of those. The past will look different if seen through a lens of Mormon theology, which applies rubrics to human existence that are broader than history itself. Strip away that rubric and some venerated pioneer leaders become venal, fanatical, or just unlikeable and inexplicable characters. Perhaps this is one reason Mormon history may seem contradictory, exploitative, or opaque to many outside the culture, and to those inside the culture, such as Morgan, who reject the fundamental religiosity of the movement and its believers. However, scholars who stand firmly on a documentary and contextual foundation have to accept accurate history as a quest for appropriate context into the world inhabited by their subjects.
Because there is more than one way to look at history, and because narrative that is written on its own terms can be easily and convincingly discredited, writers would be wise to question the genuine limits bounding what can be recovered from the past, and they must be equally careful what they assert in turn. Narrative that is intended to teach and inspire can be problematic in that it communicates its meaning by simplification, sidestepping complexity or embarrassments to present a unified message—opening itself to dismissal because it risks becoming only superficially truthful. It risks becoming counterfactual narrative—fiction (or misdirection) that conveniently extracts the lessons it wants from the past, often ignoring what is not useful to inspire. Inspirational history does not possess unique flaws. Narrative grounded in the objective, documentary approach gets into trouble because it merely describes, lacking any mechanism to motivate beyond factual awareness—its telling does not mean anything.
The midcentury argument over evidence and narrative in Mormon history that I have talked about here illustrates the root problem with both approaches, that either may be agenda driven. Critics of inspiring “faithful” history charge that it ignores inconvenient truths to create idealized perspectives. On the other side, “objective” history—evidence-based history, the kind that Brooks and Morgan pursued— claims to accept only what may be reliably documented; the trick is that historians often emulate their inspirational-history fellows, reserving the right to decide how “reliably” may be measured or applied. We can do better.
When trying to understand the past and writing about it for present readers, absolute impartiality is not only impossible, but undesirable. A serious writer of history can, however, self-consciously identify biases and perspectives up front, fairly include even inconvenient and uncomfortable facts from the past, and minimize expectations of what the past should represent. We can allow our progenitors and their antagonists to be real people again, neither angels nor demons. Charting a new course through historical perspective will therefore also stand as a challenge for the Latter-day Saints to understand their church, families, and themselves as well. The biologist Jared Diamond phrased an answer to a similar question about the relationship between motives and understanding. There is, he explained, “a common tendency to confuse an explanation of causes with a justification or acceptance of results. What use one makes of a historical explanation,” Diamond reminds us with a cautionary note, “is a question separate from the explanation itself.” 49 Let us be fair and generous about our complex and very human past. Individual readers can find motivating inspiration in the driest, most straightforward contemporary description. In my view, real people who have coped with cares and fears and choices and setbacks are far more believable and inspiring than the flawless and ultimately hollow bronze heroic figures patriotically pushed atop cultural pedestals.
Brooks became a historian during the 1930s and 1940s as a document-based “objective” approach to studying the past ground against inspirational “faithful” versions of the past. I mentioned Moses Rischin’s 1969 phrase as he discussed “the new Mormon history” that had emerged since the late 1950s. The move toward document-based history took hold within Mormon studies as Brodie’s attention went elsewhere and Brooks became one of its notable figures. The Western History Association was formed in 1963, and the Mormon History Association was formed by its LDS members and others in 1965. A lot has changed in Western and Mormon history over the past half century. Now there are Mormon-related associations for European and Pacific Rim Mormon history, for Mormon letters, and media studies. Here we are, two generations later, and the Mormon story and experience is no longer a field solely of interest to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or to the Community of Christ. Mormon studies are welcomed as branches of both U.S. history and the history of religious studies in such places as Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and the Claremont Colleges. 50 Inspirational storytelling in the style of Cecil McGavin, Preston Nibley, Joseph Fielding Smith, and Gerald Lund is not exactly gone—and, arguably, has a legitimate place—but does not hold the cultural position it once occupied without challenge. It turns out that Brooks and her friends really were at the beginning of something big. Maybe that makes her a heroic writer after all.
Appendix: Pasts in Collision, 1935–1960 51
Works in the Inspirational “Master Narrative” Style (exhibiting ethicism)
Smith, Joseph Fielding. Essentials in Church History. Deseret Book, 1922. 7/e 1940, 9/e 1942, 13/e 1953, 16/e 1960.
Barrett, William E. The Restored Church: A Brief History of the Growth and Doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Deseret Book, 1936. 2/e 1940.
Kirkham, Francis W. A New Witness for Christ in America: The Book of Mormon. Zion’s Printing & Publishing Co., 1943. 2/e 1947, 3/e 1951.
Harmer, Mabel. The Story of the Mormon Pioneers. Deseret News Press, 1943.
Nibley, Preston. Faith Promoting Stories. Deseret Book, 1943.
Driggs, Howard R. Ben the Wagon Boy. Stevens & Wallis, 1944.
Hunter, Milton R. Utah, The Story of Her People, 1540–1847: A Centennial History of Utah. Deseret News Press, 1946.
Creer, Leland H. The Founding of an Empire: The Exploration and Colonization of Utah, 1776–1856. Bookcraft, 1947.
Romney, Thomas C. The Story of Deseret. Zion’s Printing & Publishing Co., 1948.
Driggs, Howard R. George the Handcart Boy. Alladin Books, 1952.
Nibley, Preston. L.D.S. Adventure Stories. Bookcraft, 1953. ———. Stalwarts of Mormonism. Deseret Book, 1954. Hinckley, Bryant S. The Faith of Our Pioneer Forefathers. Deseret Book, 1954.
Driggs, Howard R. When Grandfather Was a Boy. Stevens & Wallis, 1957.
McGavin, E. Cecil. The Mormon Pioneers. Stevens & Wallis, 1960.
Burton, Alma P., and Clea M. Burton. Stories from Mormon History. Deseret Book, 1960.
Works rejecting Inspirationalism (exhibiting historicism
[Morgan, Dale L.] The State of Deseret. Utah State Historical Society, 1940.
Dwyer, Robert J., Fr. The Gentile Comes to Utah: A Study of Social and Religious Conflict, 1862–1890. Catholic University of America, 1941.
Stegner, Wallace. Mormon Country. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942.
Anderson, Nels. Desert Saints. University of Chicago, 1943. Brodie, Fawn M. No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith. Alfred A. Knopf, 1945.
Morgan, Dale L. The Great Salt Lake. Bobbs-Merrill, 1947.
Brooks, Juanita. The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Stanford University Press, 1950.
Nelson, Lowry. The Mormon Village. University of Utah Press, 1952.
Mulder, William A. Homeward to Zion: The Mormon Migration from Scandinavia. University of Minnesota Press, 1957.
O’Dea, Thomas F. The Mormons. University of Chicago Press, 1957.
Arrington, Leonard J. Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints. Harvard University Press, 1958.
Furniss, Norman F. The Mormon Conflict, 1850–1859. Yale University Press, 1960.
Notes
This article is a revision of a text written for the Thirtysixth Annual Juanita Brooks Lecture at Dixie State University, March 28, 2019, published as “Dear Dale, Dear Juanita: Two Friends and the Contest for Truth, Fact, and Perspective in Mormon History.” Used by permission of Dixie State University.
1. The invocations of Brooks as heroic are legion and cannot all be listed here. The ones I quote are William Mulder, review of Juanita Brooks by Levi S. Peterson, Western American Literature 24 (Summer 1989): 159–60; Levi S. Peterson, “The Saving Virtues, the Pardonable Sins,” Juanita Brooks Lecture, Dixie State University, St. George, Utah, April 28, 1989, and “In Memoriam: Juanita Brooks,” Sunstone (October 1989): 7; Laura L. Bush, “Truth Telling about a Temporal and a Spiritual Life,” in Faithful Transgressions in the American West: Six Twentieth-century Mormon Women’s Autographical Acts (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004), 81; and Charles Kelly to Dale L. Morgan, January 4, 1970, reel 14, frame 272, Dale L. Morgan Papers, MSS 71/161 c, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter Morgan Papers, UCB).
2. Myth in the sense of origin story, not falsehood. A myth is not necessarily fiction—yet like any modern myth, the pioneer myth is packed with all sorts of inspirational or instructive expectations. Though myths are often passed along undisturbed or welcome antiquarianism (study of the past as artifact—recounting and correcting dates, times, participants, geography, and other details), myths are usually ethical productions intended to inspire the rising generation of the time. See Eric A. Eliason, “Pioneers and Recapitulation in Mormon Popular Historical Expression,” in Useable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expression in North America, ed. Tad Tuleja (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997), 175–211.
3. Jose Manuel de Bernardo Ares, Historiology, Research, and Didactics: Elaboration and Transmission of Historical Knowledge (San Francisco: International Scholars Press, 1996). The philosophy of history and historiographical literatures are voluminous. Personally, I like two works, both by John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of History, 6th ed. (1984; New York: Routledge, 2015) and Why History Matters (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). One book that approaches the subjects I raise here (but more in nationalist contexts) is Jerome de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, 2nd ed. (2009; New York: Routledge, 2016). Historiography is the study of how history is presented.
4. William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (March 1992): 1347–76. Choosing a topic, period, and scope are the historian’s choices, influencing the narrative and the arc of the story being told.
5. Published as “A Close-up of Polygamy,” Harper’s 168 (May 1934): 299–307, her first important publication. Anderson’s work was published as Desert Saints: The Mormon Frontier in Utah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942).
6. A competing version of this story is given by Maurice Howe, the founding director of HRS/UWP in 1935, in Maurice Howe to Dale Morgan, May 29, 1942, reel 26, frames 895–987, and Howe to Morgan, May 30, 1942, reel 26, frame 989, both in Morgan Papers, UCB.
7. Dale Morgan to Jessie Empey, August 17, 1939, reel 27, frame 149, Morgan Papers, UCB; Levi S. Peterson, Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman Historian (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 92–93, 100–101. Brooks and Morgan began corresponding officially in 1939 as Morgan began a revision to the Washington County history for its never-completed county records inventory. They were clearly corresponding prior to the earliest surviving letters, as their exchanges are mentioned to other correspondents. The pair met for the first time when Morgan came south on Writers’ Project business in January 1941 (Morgan to Glenn R. Wilde, April 20, 1966, reel 9, frame 245, Morgan Papers, UCB).
8. Dale Morgan to Jerry [T. Gerald Bleak], October 5, 1938, Dale Morgan Papers, 1933–1978, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City (hereafter Morgan Papers, JWML); Richard Saunders, “‘The Strange Mixture of Emotion and Intellect’: A Social History of Dale L. Morgan, 1933–1942,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 28, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 39–58.
9. “The State of Deseret,” Utah Historical Quarterly 8, no. 1–4 (1940). Morgan aspired to crafting a social and cultural history of the U.S. setting in which Mormonism rose. This was under contract to Farrar & Rinehart but was never completed. Decades later, a close friend published a volume that probably comes the closest to the study Morgan imagined: Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), a volume of the Oxford History of the United States series.
10. Morgan was introduced to the massacre and the challenges of documenting it in 1939 while revising the HRS Washington County historical sketch and in corresponding with Charles Kelly.
11. Gary Topping, Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 207.
12. The documents were the anonymous first-hand account signed “Bull Valley Snort” (John M. Higbee) and an affidavit from Nephi Johnson, both reproduced as appendices in Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1950). Peterson, Brooks, 115, 129. An abstract of the presentation, “Sidelights on the Mountain Meadows Massacre,” appeared in Proceedings of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 17 (1940): 12. Beyond this abstract, no text of the presentation survives. She shelved rather than publish it, fearing social reprisal.
13. Based on her prior reports of the documents, I suspect Brooks first thought about the story in terms of a Utah Historical Quarterly article, possibly (but not certainly) built around editing the two reminiscences she had found. I may be wrong, for the version she first sent Morgan was evidently a narrative and not edited documents. Since she initially had no publisher in mind, Morgan suggested Harper’s for her article on the massacre.
14. Brooks to Morgan, September 11, [1942], reel 10, frame 1030, Morgan Papers, UCB; Morgan to Brooks, September 27, 1942, box 1, fd. 1, reel 1, frame 1835, Juanita Brooks Papers, 1941–1993, MS 486, Special Collections, UHQ 87_3 Text.indd 23410/22/19 1:20 PM J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City (hereafter Brooks Papers, JWML).
15. Brooks to Morgan, September 11, [1942]. Morgan’s review itself is in Morgan to Brooks, May 15, 1943, box 1, fd. 6, reel 1, frame 1836, Juanita Leone Leavitt Pulsipher Brooks Papers, 1928–1981, MSS B 103, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City (hereafter Brooks Papers, USHS).
16. Morgan to Brooks, June 2, 1945, box 1, fd. 9, Brooks Papers, USHS.
17. Morgan planned to write on the massacre’s “long range significance to Utah-Mormon history” as early as May 1939, before he began corresponding with Brooks; see Morgan to Maurice Howe, May 22, 1939, reel 27, frames 182–88, Morgan Papers, UCB. The pair formed a partnership to share relevant source material, in which Brooks was the greatest beneficiary, which did not bother Morgan at all; he did the same for many other people throughout his career. Compare Karl Yost, “Introduction,” in Henry DeGroot, Sketches of the Washoe Silver Mines, Reprints of Americana Series no. 3 (Morrison, IL: Reprinted for Karl Yost, 1961).
18. Morgan to Brooks, June 15, 1948, box 1, fd. 3, Brooks Papers, JWML; Morgan to Brooks, August 11, 1948, box 1, fd. 1, Brooks Papers, JWML; Morgan to Stegner, August 11, 1948, box 18, fd. 53, Wallace Earle Stegner Papers, MS 676, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.
19. Morgan conceived the plan to professionalize the Utah State Historical Society as the state’s first real public research library. Brooks’s appointment was recommended by her mentor specifically to counter the Daughters of Utah Pioneers’ influence on the way history was documented and related in the state; see Morgan to Brooks, October 3, 1948, reel 1, frame 1905; and Morgan to Brooks, March 23, 1949, reel 1, frame 1921, Morgan Papers, UCB. Marguerite Sinclair, the Society’s secretary-manager, relied heavily on Morgan’s advice for building the Society’s book collection, organizing and housing transcripts, and on physical arrangements of shelving and storage. Beyond his own letters (e.g., Morgan to Utah State Historical Society board, May 27, 1945, reel 9, frame 70, Morgan Papers, UCB), Morgan’s influence on the Utah State Historical Society can best be glimpsed in the Utah State Historical Society record series 1117 (boxes 1–2, 4, 3192, and 7323) and in the recommendations of Marguerite Sinclair Reusser and Elizabeth Lauchnor, both Society secretaries, to USHS president Joel E. Ricks located in the Ricks Papers, Special Collections, Utah State University. When Lauchnor left and A. Russell Mortensen became the Society’s first professional director in 1950, Morgan’s direct influence effectively ended.
20. The Harper’s articles are essays, almost short stories. Her first work of history, Dudley Leavitt: Pioneer of Southern Utah (privately published, 1942), a biography of her grandfather, provides not a single footnote for context. All are excellent pieces of writing that spin the tale rather than document it or reach conclusions. An argument could be made (not here) that each piece fits within the Latter-day Saint “master narrative” of the time, asserting the underlying nobility of the characters and their struggles. John Doyle Lee: Zealot, Pioneer Builder, Scapegoat (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1961) and History of the Jews in Utah and Idaho (Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1973) rest on general bibliographic essays. A careful look at her writing reveals that the notes in On the Mormon Frontier: The Diary of Hosea Stout, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press and Utah State Historical Society, 1964) are chiefly citations of published primary documents and secondary material. And on very careful inspection it becomes clear how indebted she is to Morgan even for the cited material.
21. Brooks to Morgan, February 10, 1971, reel 10, frame 987, Morgan Papers, UCB.
22. Moses Rischin, “The New Mormon History,” American West 6, no. 2 (March 1969): 49.
23. James B. Allen, “Since 1950: Creators and Creations of Mormon History,” New Views of Mormon History: Essays in Honor of Leonard J. Arrington, ed. Davis Bitton and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987), 407–38; Davis Bitton and Leonard J. Arrington, “The Professionalization of Mormon History,” in Mormons and Their Historians (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 126– 46; Robert B. Flanders, “Some Reflections on the New Mormon History,” Faithful History: Essays on Writing Mormon History, ed. George D. Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992), 35–45; Ronald W. Walker, David J. Whittaker, James B. Allen, “The New Mormon History: Historical Writing since 1950,” in Mormon History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 60–112. In a discussion of Brodie’s No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), Roger Launius asserted that the change between the older style of historical inquiry and the “New Mormon History” was due to the professionalization of the field—the postwar involvement of young, academically trained historians interested in Mormonism as a research topic. See Roger D. Launius, “From Old to New in Mormon History: Fawn Brodie and the Scholarly Analysis of Mormonism,” in Reconsidering No Man Knows My History: Fawn M. Brodie and Joseph Smith in Retrospect, ed. Newell G. Bringhurst (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996), 195–233. I agree with Bitton, Arrington, and Launius to a point, yet concentrating on the academic flowering masks the real collision that stirred the soil from which that flower grew: what happened before the Arrington generation of scholars began actively writing. Considered from a slightly different direction, the New Mormon History is really the rise of a topical specialty within academically practicing and teaching historians. Davis Bitton points out that scholarly works invoking the New Mormon History approach “have reference not to the fact of being produced recently but to distinctive approaches and questions asked.” See Davis Bitton, “Mormon Society and Culture,” in Excavating Mormon Pasts: The New Historiography of the Last Half Century, ed. Newell G. Bringhurst and Lavina Fielding Anderson (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2004), 351. See also Grant Underwood, “Re-visioning Mormon History,” Pacific Historical Review 55, no. 3 (August 1986): 403–26.
24. One exception was M. R. Werner’s biography, Brigham Young (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1925). I don’t want to imply that there was no such history published outside Utah. B. H. Roberts’s “History of the ‘Mormon’ Church” was published serially in Americana, vols. 4–10 (July 1909–July 1915) was later compiled into the Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 7 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1930). Topping, “The Tradition: Utah Historiography to About 1940,” in Utah Historians, 12–42.
25. The National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers’ mission statement is openly ethical: “Come to know our fathers, and turn our hearts to them. Preserve the memory and heritage of the early pioneers of the Utah Territory and the western U.S. Honor present-day pioneers worldwide who exemplify these same qualities of character. Teach these same qualities to the youth who will be tomorrow’s pioneers.” “Mission of the SUP,” National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers (website), accessed July 10, 2019, sup1847.com/mission -and-activities/.
26. Robert Burns, “O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us!”, Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, Project Gutenberg; Morgan to Emily Morgan, November 20, 1950, reel 21, frame 694, Morgan Papers, UCB.
27. Stories of these library collections are collected in David Whittaker, ed., Mormon Americana: A Guide to Sources and Collections in the United States (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Studies, 1994).
28. Morgan to Brooks, June 23, 1951, box 2, fd. 13, Brooks Papers, USHS. Admittedly, this is a secondhand claim.
29. Brooks to Morgan, March 6, 1947, reel 10, frame 687, Morgan Papers, UCB. Brooks twice expressly rejected Carter’s bowdlerizing approach in “The First One Hundred Years of Southern Utah History,” Proceedings of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 24 (1946–1947): 71–79; reprinted, Encyclia retrospective issue (1983): 89–98; and in “Let’s Preserve Our Records,” Utah Humanities Review 2 (July 1948): 259–63.
30. Utah’s 1897 settlement semicentennial, which involved the remaining original pioneers, was a far less overt pageant than would be organized after that generation became merely portraits on walls and names on plaques. The church’s 1930 centennial or the 1947 state centennial were exponentially more laudatory, grounded in the contemporary cultural need for enshrining heroes.
31. J. Reuben Clark, To Them of the Last Wagon (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1947). The quoted phrase is from the chorus of “They, the Builders of the Nation” cited below.
32. “They the Builders of the Nation,” lyric by Ida R. Alldredge, music by Alfred M. Durham, Hymns (1948), no. 173.
33. Maurice Howe to Morgan, May 19, 1942, reel 26, frame 987, Morgan Papers, UCB.
34. Darrell Greenwell to Morgan, September 19, 1942, reel 12, frame 1098, Morgan Papers, UCB.
35. Leonard J. Arrington, “Scholarly Studies of Mormonism in the Twentieth Century,” Dialogue 1, no. 1 (1966): 15–32; Ephraim E. Ericksen, “Psychological and Ethical Aspects of Mormon Group Life” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1922); R. Welling Roskelley, “Attitudes and Overt Behavior: Their Relationship to Each Other and to Select Factors” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1938). Please excuse the personal indulgence; I mention grandpa’s dissertation because Arrington missed it in the list compiled for the article. The Latter-day Saint experience with scholarship is explored in Thomas W. Simpson, American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism, 1867–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
36. “Documentary is the presentation or representation of actual fact in a way that makes it credible and vivid to people at the time. Since all emphasis is on the fact, its validity must be unquestionable as possible (‘Truth,’ Roy Stryker said [head of the Farm Security Administration photo office], ‘is the objective of the documentary attitude’). Since just the fact matters, it can be transmitted in any plausible medium.” “The heart of documentary is not form or style or medium, but always content.” “Social documentary . . . shows man at grips with conditions neither permanent nor necessary, conditions of a certain time and place.” William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 14, 20.
37. Stott, Documentary Expression, 56, 71.
38. Morgan to Bernard DeVoto, March 2, 1942, reel 2, frame 2147, Morgan Papers, UCB.
39. Stott, Documentary Expression, 104–17; the challenges of this approach can be glimpsed in Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935–1943, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 48–50ff, 98–99, 113–117, 149, 194– 201, 241–85.
40. The inspirational enterprise or ethicism was alive and well, personified by illustrator Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings and the Office of War Information’s highly effective propaganda campaign, which successfully challenged prewar isolationism by linking World War II with the Revolution, thus converting military service from involvement in foreign affairs into a crusade for “liberty” and “freedom.” During and after the war, a school of history known as the Consensus approach grew partly out of the national unity engendered by the war effort. Scholars associated with this approach tended to minimize the nation’s cultural and racial diversity to concentrate on “shared” heritage, the “melting pot” myth of cultural integration, and broad national stories (which privileged white heritages). See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chap. 11; Peter Charles Hoffer, “The Rise of Consensus History,” Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud (New York: Public Affairs, 2004); and Mario DePillis, review of History’s Memory by Ellen Fitzpatrick, Journal of Social History 37, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 1116–19.
41. Dale L. Morgan, “A Prophet and His Legend,” Saturday Review of Literature 28, no. 47 (November 24, 1945): 7–8. Much of what Brodie invoked was well known, but like Peter Carroll observed about his own education, Mormons had been inured by their expectations not to see these inconvenient facts. Peter N. Carroll, Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Art of History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 90.
42. Dwyer realized how Brodie’s biography had changed the historical landscape. “Here was a book without anger and without the distortion of bias [i.e., it did not automatically accept the Mormon version of events], written with as near an approach to a single eye for historical truth as is morally possible. To ignore it would be blind; to face up to it perilous.” Fr. Robert Dwyer, review of No Man Knows My History, by Fawn M. Brodie, Intermountain Catholic Register, January 27, 1946.
43. The response to Brodie specifically was formulated officially in an unsigned editorial by Albert E. Bowen, “Appraisal of the So-Called Brodie Book,” Church News 4, no. 20 (and the Church section of Deseret News, May 11, 1946), reprinted and distributed twice in pamphlet form, and unofficially in Hugh Nibley, No Ma’am, That’s Not History: A Brief Review of Mrs. Brodie’s Reluctant Vindication of the Prophet She Seeks to Expose (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1946). The unofficial response to Morgan was J. Reuben Clark’s effort to pressure the Guggenheim Foundation to quash publication of his Mormon history. Documentation of this effort is Clark’s letters to D. D. Moffatt in the Clark Papers at Brigham Young University and Morgan’s applicant file in the Guggenheim Foundation archives.
44. Edward A. Geary, “Mormondom’s Lost Generation: The Novelists of the 1940s,” BYU Studies 18 (Fall 1977): 89–98; the attribution was applied beyond novelists in Newell G. Bringhurst, “Fawn M. Brodie, ‘Mormondom’s Lost Generation,’ and No Man Knows My History,” Journal of Mormon History 16 (1990): 11–23. Even two of the key practitioners recognized the importance of this circle. See Davis Bitton and Leonard J. Arrington, “The Bridge: Historians Without Degrees,” in Mormons and Their Historians (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 108–25; Topping, Utah Historians, 3–6, 341n4.
45. “It was Juanita’s elaboration of a single complex theme within the history of Dixie which made her into, not merely a respected historian, but an authentic Utah hero.” Levi Peterson, “In Memoriam: Juanita Brooks,” Sunstone (October 1989): 7; Peterson, Brooks, 422. It is not my intent to critique her works individually but to show that they fit into a much broader whole; Topping, Utah Historians, 194–206, briefly considers the foibles and values in her major works.
46. Morgan to Brooks, December 20, 1950, box 2, fd. 10, reel 1, frame 1966, Brooks Papers, JWML. To be fair, Brooks occasionally allowed broad tolerances in the way she hewed to historicism’s line for the sake of personal comfort or to tell a story. See Topping, Utah Historians, 207–19, 220–26. The “new Mormon history” has a broad critique in David Earle Bohn, “Unfounded Claims and Impossible Expectations: A Critique of the New Mormon History,” in Faithful History: Essays on Writing Mormon History, ed. George D. Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992), 227–61. The entire volume is relevant to this paper.
47. However, Brigham D. Madsen reportedly heard Brooks publicly tell Kate Carter about the settlement of southern Utah: “You can defend Brigham Young if you want, but I won’t.” Regrettably, this gem does not appear in his autobiography and with Brig’s passing can now only be documented as folklore or hearsay. See Will Bagley, “Actions Paint a Portrait,” Journal of Mormon History 36, no. 3 (Summer 2010): xiv.
48. Feeling their values were under attack, those who value this viewpoint tended to more often express this sentiment privately and informally rather than formally in print; see, for instance, Brigham D. Madsen, Against the Grain: Memoirs of a Western Historian (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998), 213. The official response to Brodie and the unofficial response to Morgan was cited in note 43. The unofficial response to Brooks’s 1961 biography of John D. Lee is related in Peterson, Juanita Brooks, chap. 7.
49. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1997), 19. For the same sentiment in an LDS context, see Edward L. Kimball, Lengthen Your Stride: The Presidency of Spencer W. Kimball (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2009), 186–90; and Charles L. Cohen, “The Construction of the Mormon People,” Journal of Mormon History 32, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 25–64. I think one who wholly accepts an inspirational approach would disagree with Diamond—the purpose is an important component of the explanation since it determines what is told (and what is not).
50. John-Charles Duffy, “Faithful Scholarship: The Mainstreaming of Mormon Studies and the Politics of Insider Discourse” (master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, 2006).
51. This list of commercial and scholarly monographic histories is a textual rendition of the illustrations used in the Brooks Lecture. It is merely illustrative, not exhaustive, omitting four important classes of contemporary material also involved in the contest: (1) historical monograph series, such as the Daughters of Utah Pioneers lesson volumes; (2) works of doctrinal history, such as Joseph Fielding Smith, Church History and Modern Revelation, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City: Council of the Twelve Apostles, 1956–1959) or James L. Barker, The Divine Church: Down through Change, Apostacy Therefrom, and Restoration, 5 vols. (Salt Lake City: Council of the Twelve Apostles, 1951–1956); (3) local histories, including ward, stake, and mission histories; (4) privately published autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs. Of course, any list of books entirely misses a fifth class of material: articles in popular magazines and scholarly journals.
