Reviews

Saving Grand Canyon: Dams, Deals, and a Noble Myth

By Byron E. Pearson

Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2019. ix + 349 pp. Cloth, $39.95

Byron E. Pearson’s Saving Grand Canyon: Dams, Deals, and a Noble Myth examines the heroic narrative that arose after the defeat of federal proposals to build two dams on the Colorado River within Grand Canyon to provide power for the Central Arizona Project (CAP). Pearson’s study explores water resources development along the Colorado River from the beginning of the twentieth century to passage of the Colorado River Basin Project Act in 1968, which authorized CAP construction. His discussion investigates the multiple interests—federal, state, private capital, and environmental—that directly influenced policymaking regarding Colorado River development. Pearson’s study exposes the complex nature of water resources development in the American West, while also revealing holes in the constructed legend of the environmental movement’s supposed elevated role in stopping dam construction in Grand Canyon.

Pearson maintains that historians have given the lion’s share of the credit in the defeat of the Grand Canyon dams to the environmental movement, especially the Sierra Club and David Brower. He argues that while this narrative has grown to mythical status, his study seeks to correct this misconception, claiming that despite preservationists’ efforts legislation authorizing the dams would never have passed after August of 1966. He argues that other factors beyond the preservationists’ protests had an even greater impact. Pearson claims that Washington senator Henry Jackson’s powerful position as chairman of the Senate Interior Committee and his adamant opposition to proposals diverting Columbia River water to the American Southwest foreordained that any CAP legislation containing this provision would never leave his committee. In addition, political forces in California held sway over any CAP legislation unless assured their water needs were secured. Finally, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall gave up the Grand Canyon dams in 1967 to gain Jackson’s support for CAP before he and Senator Carl Hayden left office in 1968. Thus, according to Pearson, regionalism, self-interest, and desires to secure a legacy had a greater effect in removing the Grand Canyon dams from CAP legislation.

With such a complicated story as this one, Pearson focuses primarily on federal efforts to construct dams in the Grand Canyon, and he sets his sights on the roles of the federal government’s legislative and executive branches. For Pearson, the federal legislative process was byzantine, characterized by powerful committee chairmen who dictated how and when Congress acted on legislation. That power allowed them to exert inordinate control in Congress and thus constrain public involvement. The executive branch is represented by the actions of the Bureau of Reclamation, who apparently was running amok constructing projects throughout the American West by overwhelming an unsuspecting Congress with tedious engineering reports and a well-oiled publicity apparatus. This theory is problematic, because it implies that a lone federal agency could run roughshod over the entire legislative process. Moreover, it refutes Pearson’s narrative wherein he demonstrates the ability of local water interests to use their political clout to influence water policy. Federal policymaking has always worked with legislative and executive branches responding to the needs of a vocal and determined constituency. Pearson is also handicapped by a loose rendition of Bureau of Reclamation activities during the first half of the twentieth century to demonstrate its myopic view of constructing projects in the American West to serve its self-interests. According to Pearson, this rampage was finally halted with passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969, which allowed greater public scrutiny on resource development projects.

These discrepancies, although significant, do not take away from Pearson’s purpose of establishing a comprehensive narrative of the CAP/Grand Canyon Dam saga. He is correct that many historians have given greater attention and credit to the environmental movement’s role in this successful battle. Water development in the American West is, and has been, a convoluted issue involving multiple players and interests. CAP legislation emerged at a time when opportunities for new projects were becoming increasingly difficult. Rising costs of the Vietnam War and the social programs of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were making federal funds more difficult to secure. Moreover, change was in the air. As Pearson poignantly illustrates, Americans’ attitudes regarding their relationship with the natural world slowly began to evolve. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring questioned society’s faith in technology, while novel environmental laws, such as the Wilderness Act (1964) and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968), were enacted. Public distrust and disenchantment with the workings of the federal government was also emerging, represented by protests over the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. All these, Pearson argues, coalesced to aid the environmentalist cause. But as Pearson concludes, although environmentalists benefitted from these transformations in American thought and culture, it was old-fashioned political deal making that led to the eventual passage of CAP legislation, without dams within Grand Canyon.

—Andrew H. Gahan Golden, Colorado

A Diné History of Navajoland

By Klara Kelley and Harris Francis

Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019. 331 pp. Paper, $35.00

The authors of Navajo Sacred Places and Navajoland Trading Post Encyclopedia have written a unique history of Navajos and the Navajo landscape based on oral histories and archaeological research. For years, Klara Kelley and Harris Francis have worked as consultants for the Navajo Nation and Navajo-related federal programs. Their expertise includes lengthy interviews with hataaliis, or Navajo traditional ceremonialists, and “more than 30 years of work on historic preservation projects in all of Navajoland’s 110 chapters (Diné communities and units of local governance)” (4). The result is a wide-ranging book of stories and accounts grounded in the concept that “by telling how we came to be who and what we are, oral tradition makes a bond between the land and the people” (4).

Extensive citations make this a scholarly work of great value with important concepts of sovereignty and a belief in Gerald Vizenor’s term “survivance,” which combines survival with resistance. The introduction details the Blessingway ceremony, the growth of clan systems, and resilience after forced incarceration at Bosque Redondo. The federal government and federal agencies are referred to as “Washindoon” not as Washington.

This is a book with a Navajo perspective including the belief, contrary to some archaeologists, that Navajos, or at least Athabaskan people, were in the Four Corners region concurrently with Ancestral Puebloans or prior to 1300 CE. The authors argue that “more Diné ancestors might have been some of the farmer-hunter-gatherers in the small extended family sites scattered in the backcountry around the big pre-1300 Anasazi ‘great houses,’” and that “most of the People today still seem to accept what their elders have said, that their ancestors were in Navajoland far back in pre-Columbian times” (42, 43).

Other chapters discuss traditional Diné maps with the idea that history and geography are inextricably linked. Chapter 4 titled “Diné-Anaasazi Relations, Clans, and Ethnogenesis” describes how traveling Athabaskan bands emerged as distinctive Navajo clans united by songs, ceremonies, chants, and rock imagery. “Scholars have long recognized that ‘Dinétah’ (the upper San Juan region) was the scene of Navajos and Puebloans coming together,” explain Kelley and Francis (107).

The book’s strengths include chapters on Diné landscapes before the Long Walk and imprisonment, and on conflicts with Euro-American settlers and ranchers in the Checkerboard area of mixed-property ownership on the Arizona railroad frontier. The chapter on Diné traders at trading posts offsets conventional stories about trading posts and Anglo traders. Some of the oral histories focus on the livestock era after the 1930s and before trading posts devolved into convenience stores. As the authors explain, “in the decades before 1950, schooling and knowledge of English were uncommon among the people” (205).

A Diné History of Navajoland fills in important gaps with life histories of Navajo families. A fine sub-section of the book titled “Products from the Land and Goods from the Store” is a comprehensive look at Navajo families in transition with specific examples of what they produced to use, trade, and barter, and what they chose to purchase.

New information is brought to light about Navajo workers in underground coal mines near Gallup, New Mexico, but much of the northern Navajo reservation, including sections in Utah, is not well covered in the book. There is limited information on Navajo participation in World War II or employment in uranium mines during the Cold War, perhaps because those topics have been covered by other writers. The last chapter focuses on Diné land use and climate change and is innovative in its scholarship, though the disastrous ecological consequences of having over 30,000 feral horses on the reservation is not chronicled.

Kelley and Francis end the book as they began it—on a political note explaining that “Diné sovereignty has been damaged by colonizer hegemony” and that “a people’s accounts of their own history both critique and refute the self-serving stories of absence, ‘victimry’ and voicelessness that colonizers use to take Indigenous land and resources” (268). But if there is anger, there is also affirmation. “Political and cultural sovereignty are tied together through the land base of a people . . . as oral tradition protects the People’s hold on the land, the hold on the land protects oral tradition” (270).

The authors of A Diné History of Navajoland have produced a valuable reference book reflecting their life’s work. Decades from now it will still be in use, and hopefully, still be taught.

It is an essential scholarly benchmark for a diverse, culturally evolving, sovereign nation.

—Andrew Gulliford Fort Lewis College

Gay Rights and the Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences

By Gregory A. Prince

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019. 416 pp. Cloth, $34.95

Gay Rights and the Mormon Church has two primary objectives. The first is to supplement national LGBT histories with a focused history of Mormon/LGBT intersections. The second is to help LGBT Mormons by “chronicling the church’s attitudes and actions towards LGBT people” (4). Prince argues that these positions were informed by a now-discredited behavioral paradigm, and that when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints fully accepts biological homosexuality it will “inevitably call for a systemic reevaluation of [its] policies” (4). While Prince largely succeeds in producing a history of the institutional church, he provides little support for his claim that a biological etiology for homosexuality will cause a watershed moment. Prince’s skill as a historian of Mormon Studies is on full display here, as is his inexperience in the discipline of queer history.

This book provides unprecedented insight into the private deliberations and decision-making of Mormon leadership in regard to the LGBT community. In addition to anonymous interviews with church employees, Prince accessed little-known documents such as Dallin Oak’s 1984 memorandum, which strongly influenced decades of LDS policy. Prince methodically walks the reader through each U.S. state’s attempt to legalize gay marriage, clearly explaining the political strategies employed on both sides of the debate. As a result, Gay Rights and the Mormon Church is a useful reference for what was happening within the LDS hierarchy and how LDS political involvement played out on a regional level.

Prince also succeeds in documenting how the LDS leadership gradually transitioned from a behavioral paradigm that condemned homosexual feelings, to a semi-behavioral, semi-biological paradigm that accepted same-sex attraction – whatever its provenance – and only condemned homosexual behavior. However, Prince fails to convincingly argue that fully accepting a biological basis for homosexuality will change the LDS church’s current stance. Indeed, queer historians have generally avoided etiology in favor of analyzing social and cultural currents precisely because etiology does not inevitably lead to certain social positions on LGBT issues. (Many Mormons fully accept the genetic basis for homosexuality and their church’s current policies, arguing that many behaviors that transgress church teachings have a genetic component).

While meant for an LGBT audience, Gay Rights mainly speaks to the experiences of gay, cisgender men. Prince acknowledges this bias, and attributes it to the constraints of the LDS church’s “nearly universal focus [on] gay men” (20). However, archival silence can be nearly as useful a tool for the historian as archival sources. Prince’s body of work demonstrates his skill as an oral historian, and the experiences of lesbian, transgender, and intersex members in navigating an institution that was only equipped to respond to them through the paradigm of “the gay man” merits more than their three single chapters. Furthermore, Prince focuses on gay men even when his source base does not constrain him. For example, Prince’s review of the scientific literature, “The Biology of Homosexuality,” only cites studies on gay men (20–24).

Prince does lesbian Mormons a further disservice by spending much of their single chapter discussing how the expectation of celibacy is especially difficult for LGBT Mormons who want to have children. The desire for children is not unique to lesbians—many gay Mormon men find childlessness a particularly painful aspect of celibacy—and to frame this concern as a uniquely female issue perpetuates gender roles and stereotypes that the LGBT community has consciously repudiated.

Transgender Mormons get even shorter shrift in their chapter. While Prince correctly notes that gender identity is separate from sexual orientation, all transgender people have a sexual orientation. Just as lesbians are not the inverse of gay men, the intersection of sexual orientation and gender identity can produce unique challenges for transgender Mormons. Additionally, the distinction between gay and trans identities emerged fairly recently (around the 1960s) within the LGBT community, which occasionally makes Prince’s treatment anachronistic. For example, when Boyd Packer stated in 1978 that “there is no mismatching of bodies and spirits,” his statement could be fruitfully analyzed as a reflection of the entangled discourse on trans and gay identities (20). Finally, Prince repeatedly uses “transgender” as a noun rather than an adjective (e.g., “the church’s silence on transgender,” “the biology of transgender”), a jarring error equivalent to finding the phrase “the gays” in an academic publication (271, 277).

Gay Rights and the Mormon Church is an able history of institutional Mormonism, and gives compelling insight into the experience of gay men in the LDS church. For an understanding of lesbian and transgender Mormons, however, the reader must look elsewhere. Prince’s concern for the LGBT Mormon community is evident and touching, but his advocacy sometimes veers into a teleological account of LGBT/Mormon issues as they currently stand.

—Jaclyn Foster University of Utah

The Selected Letters of Juanita Brooks

Edited by Craig S. Smith

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019. 520 pp. Cloth, $45.00

A published collection of letters gives a writer and their memory to the ages. Collections of historians’ letters are uncommon, so clearly this collection is about more than a historian. It is a record of a time, a woman, and a place. Juanita Brooks is arguably the most notable figure of Utah historiography. A woman writing boldly and honestly about her own social and religious culture, she is a figure whose stature still defines an age. Best known for The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Stanford, 1950), her other major publications include a biography of a massacre perpetrator, John D. Lee, and an edited volume of the finest Utah diary of the nineteenth century, that of Hosea Stout. Brooks was a force on the Board of Control as the Utah State Historical Society was becoming the state’s first publicly accessible research library. She was a popular speaker, a fixture in St. George and throughout Utah. Despite her accomplishments, she was also deeply insecure about her work, her abilities, and the consequences of her writing.

Brooks was a letter writer at a time when letters required real effort. This one-volume collection of 220 select letters presents correspondence dating between 1939 (several years after she began her writing career) and 1978, about the time dementia began whittling away her memory and about a decade before her death. The general theme shaping the selection is Brooks as an actor in the story of Utah and its past, but much else is captured as well. The curation of the letters itself is quite affecting, drawing in not only professional correspondence but select personal correspondence as well, including a meek and perfectly honest letter to a neighbor about their dog. Brooks was a terrific letter writer. Her letters are not as long or detailed as those of her fellow professionals, such as Bernard DeVoto, Dale Morgan, or Wallace Stegner, but her personal communications possessed a quality of artless sincerity and quiet competence, qualities that seem absent from her contemporaries. I don’t think a similar collection of their letters would be nearly as interesting. While the book is structured chronologically, it is divided into chapters essentially by major writing project, each chapter introduced by the editor Craig S. Smith in a few well-chosen pages of biographical and historical context. The editor has filled in contextual notes and citations for the benefit of later scholars.

Like any book, the finished work is neither comprehensive nor exactly representative. This is fundamentally a work about Brooks, not her correspondents. Although the editor collects and presents only Brooks’s half of a correspondence, it is delightful reading. The letters, chosen for their interest and readability, miss a few that I wish would have been included—specifically her October 4, 1962, letter to Dale Morgan written upon completing the editing for Hosea Stout’s diary, the comment of an honest, earnest, and still-vulnerable student talking about her work to her mentor. It is also unfortunate that no photographs of any correspondents are included in the volume. Letters represent people, and people have faces that provide context. Unfortunately, the volume simply stops after its last letter in 1978, but Brooks lived for another decade. Although her dementia was covered briefly in the chapter introduction, the edited collection of letters would have profited from some concluding biographical comment and wrap-up of the volume.

Since publicly available digital collections are now common, published book-length volumes of collected correspondence are becoming outdated, and surely the next step for someone of Brooks’s stature is a large-scale digital project collating her widely scattered papers. The key importance of these primary sources on Brooks and her work allows glimpses of her significance throughout the volume without being stated overtly. Brooks’s approach and commitment to factually inclusive, forthright, unapologetic tellings of the past seems to be the message in her letters. The “see what the evidence suggests and tell the truth about it” approach to history she learned and adopted has come to be the accepted standard for Utah and Latter-day Saint history. That is why Brooks remains important. This is a good book, a contribution to regional literature, and a pleasure to read.

—Richard L. Saunders Southern Utah University

Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971–1997. 3 vols

Edited by Gary James Bergera

Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2018. 2,605 pp. Hardback, $150.00

Volume 1: Church Historian, 1971– 1975

Edited by Gary James Bergera, foreword by Susan Arrington Madsen, introduction by Rebecca Foster Bartholomew

From 1974 to 1977 I had the good fortune to know and work with Leonard Arrington at the Church Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Even though I worked in the Archives Division and not the History Division, I considered him a colleague and friend, then and after. As I have talked to others who worked during his years as Church Historian, I have found that my experience was not unique. As a result, I find it much easier to refer to him as Leonard—with utmost respect for his status as the dean of Mormon historians—and will do so in this review.

Without a doubt, the first volume of Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971–1997—which covers the period from November 1971 until June 1975—constitutes an important addition to our knowledge not only of Leonard but our understanding of Utah history, Mormon history, and the nature of the LDS church’s bureaucracy itself. Despite his own autobiography, and other excellent historical examinations, they are quite unique. As a result, from my perspective I find them especially valuable for three reasons.

First, it is clear that Leonard was writing to document his own life story, and there is considerable Arrington/Fort family history herein, but also to record his place in the larger historical narrative. In various places he adds insightful observations about his life. At the same time, he was simultaneously creating a broader primary source, which he assumed would be judged like any primary source. This volume is particularly useful because Leonard provides important insights on his selection as church historian, and the choosing of his assistants and staff, as well as the personalities and differences of opinion that developed over time.

Second, Leonard sought to capture information which he felt was valuable and might not be captured any other way. His lengthy entry of December 9, 1971, is a good example. In it, Leonard records a conversation with Winslow Whitney Smith, grandson of Orson F. Whitney, who said that his grandfather believed that “the Lord gives the Prophet a vision, not a blueprint.” To support this assertion, Smith reported that when asked, Heber J. Grant once stated “I never had a revelation about the Church except the revelation about the Welfare Plan.” This revelation, coming after the development of the plan by Harold B. Lee and Marion G. Romney, “shows the natural way in which revelations are received.” Smith also told Leonard that Grant had sought to name Richard W. Young as an apostle but “hadn’t asked the Lord with an open mind,” and when he did was “inspired to name Melvin J. Ballard.” Smith said he believed the “Lord couldn’t get through to [Grant] until he had an open mind” (84–85).

On other occasions Leonard provides assessments of individuals based on his own observations and research. One of the most interesting is of David O. McKay, as recorded on December 13, 1971, an honest assessment of McKay’s strengths, faults, personality traits, and place in church history. In his view, despite his faults, no person other than Joseph Smith contributed more to the church’s growth than McKay. Clearly, Leonard wanted those contemporaneous observations on the record for future scholarly reference (90–92). Indeed, anyone seeking to understand the people, policies, and decisions of this milieu will find these volumes essential.

Finally, I learned some things. Leonard was a bit of a gossip. He had a wide network of friends, associates, and people he met whose viewpoint he wanted to record. And he enjoyed a good story. Leonard emerges as a more complex and complicated person than one might assume. He was not perfect personally or professionally. He could be reflective and compassionate, but also strategic and honest. This volume allowed me to see what was happening at the Church Historical Department in a different lens than the one that I had when I worked there. In short, for me these observations were at once familiar, at once different, but always revealing. Bergera, and those who assisted him, should be congratulated for this illuminating and important contribution to the historical record.

—John Sillito Ogden, Utah

Volume 2: Centrifugal Forces, 1975–1980

Edited by Gary James Bergera, with contributions by Joseph Geisner and Lavina Fielding Anderson

This second volume of Leonard J. Arrington’s diaries begins in July 1975, three years into Arrington’s service as the first professional Church Historian of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It ends in March 1980 just as a sixteen-volume church history was announced. Gary James Bergera organized Arrington’s diaries into chapters with useful titles and introductory quotations that help define each chapter’s contents. Volume 2 includes chapters 20–40, each of which covers one to three months.

Arrington kept a diary for future historians. The main storyline in the second volume is the tugof-war between conflicting views about how religious history should be written. Arrington and his staff of nine professional historians were creating open narrative histories set into the historical context. Some General Authorities felt that academic history ignored God’s role in history. They preferred faith-promoting texts that ignored difficult issues. Arrington’s plan was to create a one-volume history for the Latter-day Saint audience to replace Church Historian Joseph Fielding Smith’s Essentials in Church History, a second volume for readers outside the church, and a multivolume series to replace B. H. Robert’s outdated six-volume history. Church leaders agreed with Arrington that these books would not require vetting by the Correlation Department. Instead, Arrington, his associates James B. Allen and Davis Bitton, and staff editor Maureen Ursenbach Beecher would approve them for publication.

Several books were written and published in the early years, but three of them attracted the most attention. I coauthored, with James B. Allen, The Story of the Latter-day Saints, which Deseret Book published in July 1976. The controversy triggered by this book delayed publication of the volume created by Arrington and Davis Bitton for outsiders. Alfred A. Knopf published The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints in 1979.

Soon after The Story of the Latter-day Saints reached the bookstores Arrington learned that three people had extracted sections from the book that they felt were inappropriate and shared them with three of the most conservative apostles: Elders Mark E. Peterson, Ezra Taft Benson, and Boyd K. Packer. Benson and Packer went public with the information. Arrington knew that “Benson will not stand for our ‘real’ history.” “[W]e are in a powerless position,” he wrote. “We have certain members of the Twelve who will speak up for us, if they are permitted to do so.” However, the Twelve’s policy was not to publicly challenge each other. Arrington wondered whether he should stay with the job and “try to write history which will be approved by Correlation” or “resign and continue to write ‘real history’” (225–26).

Two weeks later, Arrington met with the First Presidency and four members of the Twelve. Benson and Petersen explained their concerns about The Story of the Latter-day Saints and a second book, Building the City of God, a manuscript by Feramorz Y. Fox that Arrington and Dean L. May updated and published in 1976. Arrington responded to the comments and then was instructed to write more directly to church members and less to scholars and non-members. Other changes followed. On April 29, 1977, G. Homer Durham, an academic who had served as Utah Commissioner of Higher Education before his call to the Seventy, became managing director of the Historical Department. He would limit church-sponsored publications and slowly reduce the size of the staff. Either he or one of the apostles would review each publication. Another administrative change followed on February 8, 1978, when two apostles who were “advisors to the Twelve” were replaced by Gordon B. Hinckley and Boyd K. Packer to represent the Twelve as “liaison between the First Presidency and the Historical Department” (464–65, italics added). Benson’s suggestion that the History Division be moved to BYU happened four years later. The division eventually returned to join the Joseph Smith Papers project.

Volume 2 contains much more, including Arrington’s reflections on his early life and his conversations with numerous people. Professional historians and others with a deep interest in Mormon history will want to read all 2,500 pages in the three volumes. Others will find a rich narrative that reaches beyond the diaries in Gregory A. Prince’s 464-page biography, Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History (2016). A shorter version is Arrington’s 238-page autobiography, Adventures of a Church Historian (1998), published less than a year before his death. Whatever choice you make, you will discover that Arrington’s diaries document the beginning of a commitment to the professional writing of an authentic Mormon history.

—Glen M. Leonard Farmington, Utah

Volume 3: Exile, 1980–1997

Edited by Gary James Bergera, with contributions by Thomas G. Alexander and Jeffery Ogden Johnson

Leonard Arrington’s diaries present a man who catalyzed a new era in Mormon history during his tenure as Church Historian, the priesthood calling responsible for maintaining accurate records of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its history. Unlike his predecessors in the history division, Arrington was a trained, professional historian with a PhD in economics from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a faithful and practicing Latter-day Saint. Time and again, his diaries reflect a man caught in the middle of producing professional history worthy to stand alongside scholarly historical research and promoting a faithful image of the Saints that would bolster the faithfuls’ testimonies. On December 7, 1975, Arrington affirmed this struggle when he wrote, “If we survive this year, we shall have proved, as I believe we can, that Church history can be excitingly written and [still be] basically faith-promoting, and at the same time professionally and intellectually respectable. I pray that this may be true and that we can measure up, both to our devout friends and to our professional colleagues” (128).

No segment of Arrington’s life demonstrates this tension greater than the years 1980–1997, covered in the third volume of Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971–1997. It was during this period that Bruce R. McConkie delivered the “Seven Deadly Heresies” address, making clear the church’s stance on evolution and distancing itself from doctrines associated with fundamentalism, Boyd K. Packer gave his critique of the New Mormon History, the LDS Church Historical Department moved to BYU, and Arrington was released from his calling as Church Historian. At the same time, this period illuminates an increased tension between historians and the LDS church, as resignations over limited academic freedom and discipline for BYU faculty attending certain academic conferences (Sunstone Symposium) increased. Taken together, these events demonstrate a constriction within the institutional church following Arrington’s release as Church Historian. However, despite challenges and Arrington’s own frustrations, his diaries reveal a man who never wavered in his loyalty to the LDS church and commitment to producing impartial history.

During Arrington’s service as Church Historian, the goal of a more honest and open history was made tangible with a less restrictive archive. This openness became a consistent point of contention among Arrington and church leadership. Because an open archive is dangerous and frees the people from the past to be their authentic selves, it is messy and complex. The Saints are no longer mere reflections of perfection, but struggling humans reaching out toward their God as they toil to build Zion. This concern was most apparent in 1987 when church apostle Delbert Stapley spoke about the Church Historian’s responsibilities and the concern over writings that reflected poorly on the church. To this concern, Arrington replied that “if our picture is entirely rosy nobody, even members of the Church, will have confidence in what we write because members of the Church know that there are warts and blemishes and unless we acknowledge some of these they will not have confidence that we are writing the whole truth and nothing but the truth” (234). Arrington wanted a history of people as they lived; high-ranking LDS church leaders wanted a history of how they imagined their past.

Readers may appreciate that, much like his historical writing, Arrington’s diaries present a “warts and all” approach to himself. Like his characters, he does not appear one-dimensional. He broke ground through hiring women and fighting to keep them employed during the duration of pregnancy, something the church did not do previously. But he also wrote of his struggles, his anger, his illness, and his flaws. He reflected of his remarriage and frequently commented on “liberals” toward the end of his life. But, that is what good history does. It offers truthful accounts, even when it is hard.

In October 2017, I had the honor to speak with Carol Lynn Pearson about Leonard Arrington and the release of his diaries during the annual Sunstone conference in Short Creek, the historic home of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). Arrington had praised Pearson’s work time and again and expressed concern at the removal of her work from the Ensign, an official magazine of the Church, because of her public support for the Equal Rights Amendment. Over the weekend I shared bits of the diary and listened to her stories of their close friendship. Toward the end of our time together she told me about a gift she had sent Arrington, small cards that read “History is on our side, as long as we control the historians!” This phrase became a constant theme in the final part of his diaries. On August 29, 1986, he wrote, “On the one hand, history is on our side, let the consequences follow. On the other hand, it is only on our side as long as we can control the historians!” (444)

Arrington understood that history has consequences. He also understood that history could serve as a force of vindication. Mormon history vindicates the struggling, the marginalized, those subjected to the church “inquisition” (as Arrington called it) of 1983, the believers in the 1886 Revelation (whom he writes about sympathetically throughout the diaries), and the historians who felt the blunt force of church leadership in the form of excommunication during the beginnings of a new era in Mormon Studies. In life, Arrington knew this. In his death, these diaries will be part of the vindicating force of history.

—Cristina Rosetti Salt Lake City, Utah