CHAPTER 15

FAITHFUL HISTORY

“MY THIRD GREAT-GRANDMOTHER, CATHERINE PRICHARD OAKS, LOST most of her possessions when a Missouri state militia drove the Mormons out of that state in 1838. Seven years later, when state authorities stood by while a lawless element evicted the Mormons from Illinois, she lost her life from exposure on the plains of Iowa. My wife’s second great-grandparents, Cyril and Sally Call, hid in a cornfield as a mob burned their home in Illinois. My great-grandfather, Charles Harris, was sent to prison in the Utah Territory in 1893 for his practice of plural marriage. His eldest daughter, my great-aunt Belle Harris, was the first woman to be imprisoned during federal prosecution of Mormons in the 1880s.”

This recital is vintage Mormon remembrance. The speaker is Dallin Oaks, member of the LDS Quorum of Twelve, former president of Brigham Young University, Utah Supreme Court judge, University of Chicago law school professor, and law clerk to Chief Justice Earl Warren. The occasion is testimony delivered June 22, 1998, before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on behalf of the Religious Liberty Protection Act.

Mormons remember. Great-grandfather’s memoirs are privately published and bound in leather, passed down for succeeding generations to cherish. Great-great-grandmother’s diaries describe a time and a life lived and relived by her descendants. Bound blank books are a staple on sale in Deseret Book stores and church distribution outlets. From the time they are young priesthood holders, Mormon youths and their sisters are exhorted to keep journals as part of their religious commitment. Missionaries are reminded by their superiors that these journals represent a part of their sacred duties. They are fulfilling a command that the Lord gave Joseph Smith on April 6, 1830, the day the church was organized in Fayette, New York.

The Lord said, “Behold, there shall be a record kept among you” (D&C 21:1), and the first historian to keep that record was the newly appointed apostle Oliver Cowdery. John Whitmer was added as Cowdery’s assistant in 1831, also by scriptural command of the Lord (D&C 69:3, 8), to “continue in writing and making a history of all the important things which he shall observe and know concerning my church;…writing, copying, selecting, and obtaining all things which shall be for the good of the church, and for the rising generations.”

Mormonism has had an official church historian continuously from the day it was founded up to the present day. All but one of them, the late Leonard Arrington (in office 1972–1982), have been General Authorities. (Therein lies a tale to come.)

So Mormons remember, and they remember in great detail. The remembrances bind them as a people. They tell and retell their stories of pioneer privations and persecutions, of courage and faithfulness. Pioneer Day in Utah is celebrated each year on July 24 as a major holiday with parades, picnics, and reenactments with sunbonnets and covered wagons rumbling through the valley. Each summer, stakes and Mormon Boy Scout troops make mini-treks through a small patch of desert to learn something about dust and ash cakes, and how a handcart is tough to pull.

In 1897, as part of a jubilee celebrating fifty years in Utah, a monument to Brigham Young was unveiled near the temple in Salt Lake City. A few years later, under President Joseph F. Smith, the church began to purchase, rebuild, and restore some of its old sites to enshrine the past for the memories of coming generations. In 1903 the Mormons acquired Carthage Jail in Illinois, the site of the prophet’s assassination fifty-nine years before. Shortly after that the Solomon Mack homestead in Vermont was purchased and a granite monument was erected in time to honor the centennial of the prophet’s birth, December 23, 1905.

In 1904 the church acquired a site in Independence, Missouri, indicating the Saints’ continuing interest in the future Center Place of Zion. Since the tiny Temple Lot splinter church owned the actual temple site marked out by Joseph Smith, the LDS had to content itself with twenty-five acres across the way; it would build a visitors’ center there in 1971. In 1905 the church purchased the Smith homestead near Palmyra, New York, including the Sacred Grove in which the prophet had received his First Vision in 1820.

The original generation of those who had known the prophet was gone; to remind the new generation and new converts, history became religious ritual. Visitors’ centers, restored houses, historic parks, monuments, and trail markers sprouted everywhere. The “This Is the Place Monument” was dedicated at Emigration Canyon, two and a half miles from Salt Lake City, in 1921. A monument to the Mormon Battalion, the 500 who in 1846 had volunteered for the Mexican War and marched to California, was erected on the state capitol grounds in 1927, a few blocks from Temple Square. Hill Cumorah near Palmyra, New York, the place where the Angel Moroni gave the golden plates to the prophet, was purchased by the church in 1928. In the 1930s and 1940s more than 300 historic markers were placed by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers.

Today Mormon history buffs can follow the trek across Iowa, visiting restored cabins, an old ferry house, and near the Winter Quarters Temple, opened in 2001 near Omaha, Nebraska, a pioneer cemetery with 325 unmarked graves and a monument to the Mormons who died there. Around Palmyra, besides watching the lavish annual Hill Cumorah pageant each July, they can visit a reconstruction of the Smith family homestead cabin and a restoration of the original family farmhouse, see the homes of Peter Whitmer and Martin Harris, stroll in the Sacred Grove where Joseph Smith received his First Vision, and admire the restoration of the Grandin print shop where the original 5,000 Book of Mormon copies were printed. Most importantly, since 2000 history buffs have been able to conduct rites in the white granite Palmyra Temple. In Ohio they can visit the original Kirtland Temple (though it is owned by the Community of Christ) and six renovated buildings. Missouri has Liberty Jail. The Nauvoo restoration in Illinois is divided between the Community of Christ and the LDS Church, which has rebuilt the Nauvoo Temple of old (dedicated in 2002). And Salt Lake City has places like the Lion House and Beehive House, where Brigham Young lived with some of his wives, though guides tiptoe around the polygamy question. Recent land acquisitions include the site in Pennsylvania where Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon; the oldest surviving meetinghouse, an 1836 building in Worcestershire, England; and the Martin’s Cove tract in Wyoming where handcart pioneers froze to death. The church maintains dozens of such sites, complete with visitors’ centers and tours. Staffing is generally by missionary volunteers.

Some of the restorations are more successful than others. Liberty Jail has a certain theme-park flavor, reconstructed with an exploded front and encased in a large climate-controlled visitors’ center shell, the jail populated by wax figures. Sister missionaries guiding a tour press buttons to activate recorded readings from the prisoners’ letters and diaries. It is hard to feel cold and isolated as the real 1838 prisoners must have felt.

The Nauvoo restoration provides tourist Saints with an idealized “City of Joseph.” A film producer used New York State’s restored, secular Genesee Country Village as the backdrop for some of the “Nauvoo” scenes in a Mormon documentary being prepared for public television because the real present-day Nauvoo is just a mite too pretty. But then, how many visitors to Williamsburg remember the slave quarters? Even with the neat lawns and the exquisite sculpture gardens, something of the ghosts of the real Nauvoo seems to haunt the old Mississippi River town.

Reenactment is a central ingredient in what Davis Bitton called “the ritualization of Mormon history.” In that ritualization certain stories achieve a status of mythic proportion; they become cherished legends in a somewhat romanticized and simplified communal heritage. It is a process common to secular patriotism, to the shared history of any religious body or American ethnic group, even to any successful family.

The Miracle of the Seagulls is an example of the ritualization process. It is one of the first faith-promoting stories a Mormon child learns, in simplified version, at home or in Sunday school. Later that child may enact the story in a stake drama or pageant. Over the years the same young Mormon will see the story as the subject of paintings and engravings, curriculum, and magazine graphics. It has become a deeply emotional symbol of pioneer faith, struggle, and triumph. Visitors to Temple Square can view the 1913 Seagull monument; honored visitors may be given a miniature replica. The seagull story became an episode in “Promised Valley,” the huge outdoor musical pageant first presented in 1947 centennial celebrations and then decades afterward for tourists in Manti, Utah.

The actual event (seagulls appearing to devour a cricket invasion that threatened to destroy the first pioneer summer crop) did not seem so miraculous at the time, according to the research of William G. Hartley. Diaries of 1848 Great Basin pioneers generally talk about the crickets but ignore the gulls. A letter to Brigham Young did express the belief that “the hand of the Lord” brought the gulls. But the 1848 harvest, because of the crickets, frost, and insufficient irrigation, was marginal. Hartley wrote that the official 1848 First Presidency report rated the gulls as “helpers but certainly not as rescuers.” The harvest would have been worse without the birds. The gulls did not suddenly appear in Utah in 1848; they had been mentioned in explorers’ memoirs decades earlier, and their cricket-eating habits have been observed by ornithologists in major cricket wars elsewhere in the nation as recently as 1952. “Miracle” status apparently has grown since an 1853 General Conference mention by Apostle Orson Hyde, amplified and reinforced over the years by stories in Mormon publications and official church histories.

The church’s Legacy movie that long ran in the Temple Square visitors’ center is an example of ritualized history, effectively idealized and simplified. The movie dramatizes the early Mormon story from Palmyra to Salt Lake City through a composite fictional female character based on real pioneer journals and letters. It provides little clue as to why midwestern Mormons were persecuted other than that they were misunderstood and opposed slavery. There is no hint of polygamy or millennial land claims or any other distinctive Mormon doctrine, just the idea that a prophet named Joseph Smith came up with a new sacred book asking people to lead holy lives. Missouri Governor Boggs’s famous “extermination” order is quoted, ignoring the fact that Smith’s counselor Sidney Rigdon had actually introduced the word, throwing down the gauntlet in a published sermon delivered the previous July 4. Smith dies off-camera with someone crying, “They’ve killed him! They’ve murdered Joseph Smith at the Carthage Jail!” There is no scene that shows the smashing of the Expositor press or gives a real clue to the issues raised by the newspaper.

“Any people in a new land may be pardoned for being solicitous about their history: they create it, in a sense, by remembering it,” wrote Wallace Stegner. “But the tradition of the pioneer that is strong all through the West is a cult in Utah.”

As a popular expression of ritualized history, Mormons have developed something of an annual outdoor pageant circuit, presented to tourists but faith-affirming to participants and most of the audience. The first of the great pageants was “The Message of the Ages,” presented April 6, 1930—during the centennial celebration of the church’s founding—in Salt Lake City’s Tabernacle, with a cast of 1,500. The first pageant at Hill Cumorah near Palmyra, “Footprints in the Sands of Time,” was presented on July 24 of the same summer. The Hill Cumorah pageant, now “America’s Witness for Christ,” has been presented annually in July since 1937. Regular large-scale pageants are presented in seven U.S. locations, from Hill Cumorah to Nauvoo (“the City of Joseph”) to Manti, Utah (“Mormon Miracle Pageant”), to Oakland, California (the triennial “And It Came to Pass”).

But the Hill Cumorah pageant is something special, because this is where it all began. When lightning strikes, volcanoes belch, and the sky is swept by a powerful beam so bright that it requires FAA clearance, the citizens of Palmyra know it is pageant time again. Years ago the locals resented the annual LDS influx; now a typical hand-lettered sign in a pizza shop window across from the Grandin print shop reads, “Welcome LDS Members.” In 1991 the LDS suggested that local civic groups should handle a food concession tent on the pageant grounds. Smart move, and everyone’s happy. Four local clubs share these responsibilities, each organization in a typical year clearing $8,000–10,000 in profits for scholarships and local civic projects. It’s “our” Palmyra pageant. Since 1937 more than two million visitors have seen it.

Troupe members—630 actors and more than 150 on the support staff—are volunteers who pay for the privilege, treating it as a short-term mission, the cast giving 17 days of vacation time, the crew longer. In a typical year the administration receives 1,800 applicants; about 30 percent of the cast are repeaters, and many families participate together. One recent year Donny Osmond played Samuel the Lamanite, and a young son of his was also in the cast; the previous year the Osmond clan had watched the show, sitting somewhere in the ocean of 8,000 folding chairs. Each year the personnel arrive in vans and station wagons, many with campers and tents to set up in the nearby “Zion’s Camp” campground, while others check in at the dormitory of a nearby college.

Each incoming participant receives a folder carefully outlining elaborate rules and directions. Cast members are admonished not to chew gum when in costume, nor to risk stains by sitting on the grass. Wigs and costumes each year must be refitted and refurbished, replaced by set rotation. At cast meetings boys aged twelve to fourteen are warned not to continue the war backstage; banner carriers are cautioned not to let the flags drag in the mud because “these props belong to God.” Cast members have only slightly more than a week before things must fall together for the first performance, but the daily schedule includes devotions in the morning and evening and a brief prayer meeting session before bedtime. Cast members are supposed to read through the Book of Mormon in the weeks before arriving, and again during their days in residence.

To many it is a deep family as well as religious experience. For Dan Kimbler, a Saint from nearby Holly, New York, 1998 was his fourth year in the cast along with his four sons ranging from ages eighteen to six. His wife had died of cancer five years earlier, so Kimbler takes vacation time for this each year as a “good experience for the whole family.”

Another repeater in 1998 was Bill Matthews, a Chicago-area FBI agent who played Abinidi the prophet; his wife and six children were all in the cast. “It’s a wonderful experience to share with your family,” says Matthews, “but that’s a side benefit, though important. The central message is to be a witness to Jesus Christ.”

Bruce Marshall, a career army major from Huntsville, Alabama, has been a cast member twice with his wife and six children, but 1998 was a year just to come and soak it in. “It’s a real testimony builder,” says Marshall. “You can see the change in kids backstage, kids crowded together reading the Book of Mormon.” This year his kids had the choice of visiting Disney World or the pageant for vacation. They chose the pageant.

The 1998 pageant was typical with its cast blending blue-collar workers with professionals; this year included a newlywed couple from Utah using their honeymoon to participate; an Air Force colonel; a California college student who had saved for months to come and had dreamed for years of being in the cast; a woman who had returned for twenty-two years, whose husband converted through pageant involvement, and whose three married children now return each year with spouses and children.

After a day of rain 150 LDS youths visiting from Kentucky wiped down the folding chairs with mildew preventive, preparing for the public dress rehearsal. Before the performance, Artistic Director Rodger Sorensen reminded his cast, “How close are we to being God? The performance is nothing without your testimonies.” Cast members got drenched in a downpour, but the show went on, and most of the audience remained, cheerfully loyal and huddling under plastic ponchos. Only lightning or dangerous high winds cause cancellation, and since 1937 that has happened only two or three times.

A good percentage of the crowd each year is probably Mormon, but there are visiting Gentiles as well, drawn by the (free) spectacle of special effects, elaborately dashing cape and feather costumes, dramatic lighting, waterfalls, smoke, and swords. Staging is on a seven-level hillside venue under a monument to the Angel Moroni. Sound is high-tech, with the voices of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, a children’s chorus, and the Utah Symphony. The actors lip-synch their parts. In a typical year 80,000 attend the seven performances, leaving 1,500 inquiry cards with the missionaries in costume who circulate to work the crowds before the pageant begins each night. But the most important result of each year’s pageant is in the lives of the Saints who participate and attend, an experience confirming them in their shared history and faith.

History, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is more than pageants, parades, trail markers, monuments, and restored homesteads. There is a very real sense in which the church’s history is its theology, and that not merely the supernatural events surrounding the church’s beginnings with the Angel Moroni and the golden plates at Hill Cumorah. In a body that believes itself the recipient and expression of continuing revelation, it is everything that has happened to the church ever since. And just as creedal churches have official statements of faith, the Mormon Church tends to have official versions of sacred history.

With the zeal for record-keeping in the church, which goes all the way back to 1830, quorums and auxiliaries have kept minutes of meetings and other relevant documents; church newspapers and periodicals have published accounts of events; members have written their own diaries and journals. This has reaped an enormous harvest of primary-source and contemporary secondary-source materials. Much of this archival resource, a sort of mammoth ecclesiastical history scrapbook, was uncataloged until the 1970s.

The church has owned printing presses almost from the beginning, and they have kept very busy producing newspapers, from the Times and Seasons in Nauvoo to the Millennial Star in England and Deseret News in Utah, to magazines for the whole church and individual auxiliaries, books, and pamphlets. Joseph Smith began his own history of the church. After his death Willard Richards compiled much of the prophet’s history, including items published in Times and Seasons, minutes, records of ordinances, sermons and speeches, and the prophet’s diaries and letters. This work was continued later by church historians whose labors included compiling all the Brigham Young documents. In the 1970s historians went through some papers still boxed in the original containers used for hiding items from the Feds in the 1858 Utah War.

From 1854 to 1886 a semimonthly periodical, the Journal of Discourses, printed the sermons and speeches of important church authorities. Wilford Woodruff, before he became church president, worked for twenty-seven years as assistant church historian publishing biographies of church leaders and editing Joseph Smith’s sermons for the History of the Church. B. H. Roberts and Joseph Fielding Smith wrote officially sanctioned histories, and Roberts edited a seven-volume version of the original prophet’s History of the Church, published by the denomination in 1932.

A newly established tradition tends to reinterpret the past through its own eyes. Thus, Christians view the Old Testament from a different perspective than do Jews. Similarly, Mormons view Christian history through eyes that are different from those of traditional Christians. In the process of doing so, they are shaping their own tradition and interpretation of the past.

Jan Shipps, a non-Mormon scholar, has said that during the years of the “gathering” Mormons were conscious of living through their own sacred history in a new age. They were also, in a sense, recapitulating the sacred history of scripture through their own experiences. When Brigham Young led his people to the Great Basin, he led them “backward into a primordial sacred time.” The Saints were in a holy time and a holy space where they would build God’s kingdom, a new Israel on earth.

When the Book of Mormon and the Smith canon broke into history in 1830, it introduced a startling gap in Christian history. According to it, after Christ’s resurrection the church fell almost immediately into what Mormons call the “Great Apostasy.” Truth was hidden until discovered by Joseph Smith. For Catholics, Christian history is continuous from the early church to the present day. Protestants vary in their degree of historical amnesia, but most recognize that their own history borrows from Catholic continuity. Mormons are different. For them, Christian history after the period of the primitive church is what Shipps called a lacuna, a complete void of 1,400 to 1,800 years before Joseph Smith’s restoration. Mormonism had to shape for itself a new and usable past.

For Mormonism, more than other religions, history evolves as part of the church’s canon. High school and college students in their seminaries and institutes take required church history courses; in addition, the required Doctrine and Covenants study is largely history as well, with a great deal of governance and lifestyle matters embedded in the context of revelation. The D&C doctrinal teaching involves surprisingly little of what traditional Christian catechism would call “pure theology.” As George Orwell puts it in has famous quote, “he who controls the past controls the future and he who controls the present controls the past.” The LDS Church even has a body with the Orwellian-sounding name of “Correlation Committee” charged with the responsibility of ensuring that all church publications, from periodicals to curriculum materials, follow official policy and express official interpretations. This means that sensitive historical issues frequently are downplayed, avoided, or denied.

As Martin Marty has observed, Mormon beginnings are so recent that there really is “no place to hide. What can be sequestered in Mormon archives and put beyond the range of historians can often be approached by sources outside them…. There is little protection for Mormon sacredness.”

Much of the church’s own shaping of its past is to be expected, but the results occasionally can be unintentionally comical. The church’s almanac, for example, carries brief biographies of all the church presidents. It lists Emma Smith as Joseph’s wife, and the wives of all the presidents from George Albert Smith to the present day. The almanac’s silence on the marital history of Brigham Young, John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, Lorenzo Snow, Joseph Fielding Smith, and Heber J. Grant would seem to imply that these polygamists represent an unbroken string of celibate bachelors.

Never mind Brigham Young’s twenty or more wives and fifty-seven children. The 1997 manual published in twenty-two languages for required study worldwide by the Relief Society and all Melchizedek priesthood holders, Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Brigham Young, presents Young as a monogamist. A “Historical Summary” outlining Young’s life with dates mentions his first marriage, the date of that wife’s death (1832), and the date of his second (legal) marriage (1834). Mention of any other marital history is completely missing. Also noticeably absent are Young’s controversial ideas that are no longer propounded by the church: blood atonement, for example, and the idea that Adam was God the Father and Eve was one of God’s wives. The quotes representing his ideas are chosen to avoid offense on gender, race, and nationality. Mormonism’s most flamboyant leader has been rendered acceptable for the twenty-first century—and almost carefully colorless.

Even the scriptures have been rewritten to fit current doctrine, in line with the idea of continuity and progressive revelation. But once a new version is published, historians are not supposed to notice the change, nor can they write about variations in previous editions. The church regards such reminders as unacceptably embarrassing. The result has been something of an underground traffic in early church documents and editions.

D. Michael Quinn noted, perhaps with chagrin, that the noted career apostates, onetime Mormons Jerald and Sandra Tanner, published the only “extensive comparison” of changes in Joseph Smith’s History of the Church in its various published versions. Compilers of that work “deleted evidence, introduced anachronisms, even reversed meanings in manuscript minutes and other documents which were detailed and explicit in their original form.” Furthermore, Quinn wrote, “in 1835 the Doctrine and Covenants began a policy of retroactive editing by reversing previous meanings, adding concepts and whole paragraphs to the texts of previously published revelations. The official alteration of pre-1835 revelations is the more fundamental context for the later pattern of editing in the History of the Church.”

The result of this is that for Mormons history—and truth, which is supposedly embedded in history—is dynamic and fluid. There is nothing quite like what the poet T. S. Eliot called “the still point of the turning world.” As Mark P. Leone commented in Roots of Modern Mormonism, in Mormonism truth is not absolute or fixed; it is changeable, flexible, and additive. According to Leone, “it is no wonder that the church has discouraged any intellectual tradition that would interfere with disguising historical factors or with maintaining much of the social reality through the uncritical way lay history is done.”

Mormon teachers are required to present the currently acceptable, faith-promoting, official view of history, Apostle Boyd Packer said in a famous speech to the annual Church Educational System Religious Educators’ Symposium in 1981. Packer, presenting marching orders to CES seminary and institute teachers, gave four “cautions”: (1) “There is no such thing as an accurate, objective history of the Church without consideration of the spiritual powers that attend this work”; (2) “There is a temptation…to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith-promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful”; (3) “In an effort to be objective, impartial, and scholarly, a writer or a teacher may unwittingly be giving equal time to the adversary…. In the Church we are not neutral. We are one-sided. There is a war going on, and we are engaged in it”; (4) The fact that something is already in print or available from another source is no excuse for using potentially damaging materials in writing, speaking, or teaching: “Do not spread disease germs!”

Packer quoted President Ezra Taft Benson warning CES teachers not to purchase books or subscribe to periodicals that publish writings of church critics, particularly “known apostates,” for either seminary or personal bookshelves. Benson had told the seminary and institute teachers, “We are entrusting you to represent the Lord and the First Presidency to your students, not the views of the detractors of the Church.”

This stance has led to open warfare in history scholarship. On the one side are the proponents of “faithful history,” scholars such as Louis Midgley and David Earl Bohn—not historians but professors of political science at Brigham Young University. These men have written essays for independent journals such as Sunstone as well as church-sanctioned publications, defending the idea that “objective” or neutral history scholarship is an illusion. If one’s research into history proceeds from naturalistic presuppositions, it will inevitably do violence to faith claims. Only history that proceeds within the language of faith can do justice to an understanding of the sacred. This is the approach of “traditional” or “faithful” history. Its opposite is presented as a form of positivist deconstruction, history corroded by the caustic acids of criticism. Such history obscures God’s role in history. And such history is capable of undermining faith—hence Packer’s warnings to teachers in the Church Educational System.

Somewhere on the other side are scholars of “new Mormon history,” such as the aforementioned Leonard Arrington, the late church historian who eventually ran afoul of Apostle Packer (which is easy to do). Another was D. Michael Quinn, whose research into post-Manifesto polygamy and other sensitive areas of LDS history led to his eventual resignation from a tenured professorship at Brigham Young University, loss of his temple recommend, and finally his church membership.

The church has always tried to retain a proprietary hold over the telling of its own history. The earliest clear example of this is the checkered history of mother Lucy Mack Smith’s Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith, the Prophet, and His Progenitors for Many Generations, first published by Apostle Orson Pratt in Liverpool in 1853. Brigham Young was unhappy with the book and ordered the printing destroyed.

The traditional explanation for the suppression of Lucy’s book is that Young had various disagreements with Pratt and was unhappy with the book’s favorable presentation of the prophet’s brother William. Jan Shipps, studying the evidence, believed the real reason Young quashed the book was that the prophet’s mother had emphasized the Smith family rather than simply Joseph Jr. alone, thus implying the legitimacy of a concept of Smith lineage in church leadership. This would become the teaching of Utah’s rival, the midwestern-based RLDS, of which Joseph III eventually assumed the leadership. Brigham Young recalled the book, therefore, because “buried in its pages could be found an implicit challenge to [his] legitimate right to lead the Mormon Church.”

The most serious problems occur when the church suppresses evidence that is contrary to official interpretation. “Faithful history” tends to be apologetic and celebratory, to downplay or avoid sensitive aspects of Mormon history. It is not, for example, politically correct to suggest that Mormons, while victims, were not always innocent victims, or that though holiness may be an affront to the observer, ordinary Saintly holiness was not usually the cause of Mormon persecutions.

There is, Quinn wrote, such a thing as simple honesty among scholars. If “omission of relevant evidence is inadvertent, the author is careless. If the omission is an intentional effort to conceal or avoid presenting the reader with evidence that contradicts the preferred view of the writer, that is fraud.” He contended, “Traditional Mormon apologists discuss such ‘sensitive evidence’ only when this evidence is so well known that ignoring it is almost impossible.”

The second half of the twentieth century saw an outpouring of history by Mormon as well as non-Mormon scholars. The Mormon History Association was founded in 1965, and soon thereafter many history articles were published by the MHA Journal, the independent Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, the RLDS John Whitmer Historical Association and its journal. More interest in history developed in BYU Studies and there appeared other forums for presenting papers, such as the B. H. Roberts Society.

If the scholar was Mormon and the church did not like the message, it attacked the messenger. Mormon studies became an increasingly dangerous area for Mormon scholars, especially if they were members of the Brigham Young University faculty. In 1981 the head of the BYU history department, Eugene Campbell, told a session of the American Historical Association that authorities had warned him to discourage faculty scholarship relating to polygamy or blacks and the priesthood.

The first of the censured Mormon historians was probably Fawn Brodie, excommunicated for her caustic 1945 biography of the first prophet. First Counselor J. Reuben Clark Jr. had the Deseret News publish his critique of the book, though he had refrained from reading it. Next came Juanita Brooks with her 1950 book Mountain Meadows Massacre. She averted excommunication by local church officials but received an ecclesiastical blacklisting. The First Presidency learned about Warner Brothers movie studio plans to produce a major film based on Brooks’s book about the massacre on November 5, 1951, and in seven days managed successfully to pressure the studio to kill the project.

The 1984 biography Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith by Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery presented a sympathetic portrait of a complex woman, as well as the deceit of Smith toward her over his practice of polygamy. The Utah church has traditionally been critical of Emma because she remained in the Midwest and eventually lent support to the RLDS. Also, she had bitter disagreements with Brigham Young over the distribution of her husband’s estate. Smith’s financial affairs had been hopelessly entangled with the church. For a year after the book’s publication, church authorities banned Newell and Avery from speaking publicly in church meetings.

The sensational 1985 Mark Hofmann murder and forgery case could only have happened in connection with the curious mixture of paranoia and obsessiveness with which Mormons approach church history. In the early 1980s there was a sudden boomlet in valuable documents relating to early Mormon history. This was exciting to some private collectors, and it was of more than passing interest to the church. Some of the documents seemed to verify traditional views of church history; some threatened to embarrass the church. The dealer and discoverer of the documents was Hofmann, a young former pre-med student, returned Mormon missionary, husband, father, and, like many other Saints, church history buff.

Private collectors began to vie for the privilege of buying exciting Hofmann discoveries. Through collector donations and outright purchases, the church began to acquire documents from Hofmann. The church publicized some of the acquisitions; it orchestrated public relations for some that were known to be sensitive; others it acquired secretly and suppressed. Gordon B. Hinckley, then second counselor in the First Presidency, largely handled policy in these matters and directed the public relations responses of the church.

For a time Hofmann made a handsome profit in one of the most brilliant forgery projects of the century. In 1983 Hinckley paid $15,000 for a letter from Joseph Smith to Josiah Stowell that showed Smith to be experienced at money-digging treasure hunting, raising the delicate matter of Smith’s occult and folk magic activities in the 1820s. Another purchase was a Lucy Mack Smith letter, price estimated at $30,000. The so-called salamander letter, which the church acquired indirectly through the collector Steven Christensen, later one of Hofmann’s murder victims, cost $40,000. According to this letter, a magic white salamander appeared to Joseph Smith, not the Angel Moroni, in the prophet’s First Vision. In the end the church acquired forty-eight documents from Hofmann directly, plus the salamander letter.

Eventually Hofmann’s fraud began to catch up with him. To create a decoy, Hofmann killed Christensen and one other innocent person and injured himself with pipe bombs in three separate Salt Lake City incidents in October 1985.

The forgeries had fooled a number of document experts. Not only the church but a number of distinguished historians had also been deceived, and some scholars had to adjust their research to account for the fraudulent documents. During Hofmann’s murder trial forensic document examiner George J. Throckmorton developed new ink and paper tests that proved the forgeries. For Hofmann, forgery had been a profitable and interesting game, as well as financially rewarding. But another motivation that propelled the forger was the desire to embarrass the church by undermining traditional church history. Hofmann, it turned out, was a closet apostate. He was sentenced to life in prison.

The church, in the aftermath, attempted to do everything possible to correct the record. Ensign published a list of Hofmann forgeries it had used over the years. The LDS Church had received a genuine original Smith Book of Commandments (precursor to the D&C) from the RLDS in exchange for a Hofmann document purporting to be the Joseph Jr. blessing of his son Joseph III. The blessing would tend to affirm the patrilineal succession used by the RLDS Church. After the forgery was exposed the LDS Church voluntarily returned the Book of Commandments to the RLDS.

The public relations damage as well as the forgery losses meant the church was also a Hofmann victim. Policy today is to strongly encourage donation rather than purchase of historical materials, and the church history department readily submits documents to the most sophisticated forensic analysis as needed.

The most poignant episodes of the church history department relate to its most distinguished historian, Leonard J. Arrington. A true-blue believer, lover of life and good stories, Arrington was solidly in the front rank of scholars with the achievement of Great Basin Kingdom and other publications. His first brush with running afoul of official history, as previously mentioned, had been his essay on the history of Word of Wisdom observance in the first issue of BYU Studies in 1959. Apostle Mark Petersen had taken exception to Arrington’s exposing the fact that nineteenth-century pioneers regarded the Word as advice rather than as prohibition. The journal had been suspended for a year.

Arrington described the BYU Studies episode in his 1998 memoir, Adventures of a Church Historian. A historical footnote was added in 1999. BYU Studies published a fortieth anniversary issue with a brief essay of reminiscence by each of its former editors. The founding editor, Clinton F. Larson, wrote, “Nephi does not prescribe limitations for writers who are pure at heart.” There was no mention of the 1959 suspension. The journal’s second editor, Charles D. Tate Jr., wrote in the anniversary issue, “The Brethren never did exercise any control over BYU Studies while I was the editor. I can only assume it was the same with those editors before and after me.”

Arrington’s teaching career included a year as a Fulbright professor at the University of Genoa in Italy; a visiting professorship at the University of California at Los Angeles; and a professorship at Utah State University. He had been founding president of the Mormon History Association, an organization that includes RLDS scholars, non-Mormons, and interested persons who are not professional historians. His strong commitment to church service included a stake presidency position.

Through the 1960s Joseph Fielding Smith had recognized the need to organize and catalog the church’s vast library and archives along professional lines. In 1970 Smith appointed Apostle (later President) Howard Hunter to follow him as church historian; Hunter similarly recognized the need to professionalize the church’s vast archives. In 1972 the First Presidency and the Twelve decided to establish a professional history division, headed by a professionally trained church historian. Notifying Arrington of his appointment, Apostle Hunter assured him that the church was “mature enough that our history should be honest.” The position included a half-time professorship at BYU. On April 6, 1972, at the spring General Conference, Arrington was sustained as church historian; James B. Allen and Davis Bitton, two old friends who were also professional historians, were sustained as his assistants.

Arrington discovered that the copy of Great Basin Kingdom in the church historian’s office had been cataloged with a little letter “a” on the index card to signify “anti.” The book apparently had not provided enough supernatural explanations, so a librarian decided “if it wasn’t pro-Mormon it must be anti.” The index card was a harbinger of things to come.

At first the church historian’s office was exhilarated by the expanding opportunities that lay just ahead. A number of researchers and support personnel were added to the staff. Ambitious projects were planned: inauguration of an oral history program; a series of articles for church magazines; a sixteen-volume sesquicentennial history for publication by the anniversary year of 1980; two one-volume church histories, one for a Mormon audience to be published by Deseret and the other aimed at non-Mormons to be published by Alfred A. Knopf; several biographies of church leaders; editions of autobiographies and letters; training fellowships and development of support organizations.

James Allen and Glen Leonard wrote the Deseret one-volume history, The Story of the Latter-day Saints; Arrington and Bitton produced the history for Knopf, The Mormon Experience; contracts were signed with various scholars for the anniversary history; several shorter projects got under way.

But trouble was also soon under way. Apostle Boyd K. Packer was unhappy with Letters of Brigham Young to His Sons, edited by Dean Jessee. Apostle Hunter thought the letters were “warm and wonderful,” but Packer wrote a four-page missive to the First Presidency objecting to the new history department’s “orientation toward scholarly work” and the book’s mention, for instance, of such negative details as family litigation against Young’s estate.

The Allen-Leonard volume would strike any knowledgeable non-Mormon reader as circumspect, but some members of the Quorum of Twelve disliked “the absence of inspiration,” for example, the lack of emphasis in the seagull story on God’s miraculous intervention. Ezra Taft Benson and Mark Petersen were especially negative in their reactions. Benson spoke out publicly against “historical realism” and those who “inordinately humanize the prophets of God.” Benson disliked the term “communitarian” used in connection with nineteenth-century cooperative economics, possibly because it was too close to “communism.” (Benson had been a John Birch Society supporter.) However, these objections were not generally brought directly to the church historian, who said he sometimes felt “like a mouse crossing the floor where elephants are dancing.”

The Allen-Leonard book sold out quickly but was not permitted to be reprinted until 1986. By 1977 the history department had a new “managing director,” G. Homer Durham, and Arrington was informed that a subcommittee consisting of Apostles Hinckley, Petersen, and Packer was going to investigate all publications flowing from the church historian’s office.

Arrington noted in his memoir a catalog of observations he had listed in his July 1977 diary, detailing the troubling anti-intellectualism of church leaders:

Eugene England and Lowell Bennion were not permitted to publish with Deseret Book or Bookcraft by direct intervention of two members of the Twelve. Carol Lynn Pearson was blacklisted from church publications until she was able “through prayers and tears” to get one of the Twelve to reverse the decision. Jim Allen was viewed with suspicion because of the Story of the Latter-day Saints. The Church News could not review Building the City of God or any other book by our History Division employees without specific clearance from the Twelve. Claudia Bushman and Scott Kenney could not be published or mentioned because of their connection with Exponent II and Sunstone. Several Mormon intellectuals were publishing under pseudonyms.

The bright hopes of the church history department had dimmed. By 1978 the ambitious anniversary history was shelved; the church bought out the contracts, and eight of the projected sixteen volumes were later published independently. Of the department’s remaining work, Durham examined “every article, manuscript of a talk, and preliminary book manuscript” like a “professor [going] over term papers, theses, and dissertations.” More was to come. “Most damaging to our work were the steps he took to remove all the scholars from the department,” Arrington wrote. Some got transfers; others found replacement jobs; one went to law school.

In 1979, Arrington said, the chairman of the church’s Strengthening Church Members Committee arranged with two BYU students to spy on Arrington’s teaching activities and report back weekly. After two weeks one of the pair confessed the arrangement to Arrington. The following year the history division was officially moved to BYU as the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History, thereby severing its direct connection to the church archives in Salt Lake City. The church history department was restructured by Hinckley and Durham.

In 1982 the First Presidency sent a personal letter to Arrington informing him that he had been released from his call as church historian and director of the history department. The release was not publicly announced in General Conference.

As the 1980s progressed, the church historian’s office in Salt Lake City instituted restrictions limiting access to church archives and asking researchers to sign releases giving the church permission to exercise prepublication censorship. Access to many materials, including the papers of deceased General Authorities, formerly available to non-Mormon researchers as well as to loyal Mormons, was restricted or denied. D. Michael Quinn, in a lengthy footnote to his 1998 revised and enlarged edition of Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, detailed the gamesmanship between researchers and archive policies. Some families have acquired photocopies of the General Authority ancestors’ diaries that they had donated to the church; they donate their photocopies in turn to other libraries so that researchers can have open access to church-restricted sources. Some researchers have donated their transcripts of now-restricted documents to other libraries. Quinn listed the sources and the libraries. However, a church spokesman contended that guidelines for access to the church archives “are no different from those of many other institutions” and noted that some 500,000 pages of nineteenth century LDS materials have been issued in a DVD series.

Arrington continued to be well loved in the community of history scholars and beyond. President Hinckley attended his February 1999 funeral. But the final ecclesiastical footnote to his career is a certain absence in the hall near his onetime office as church historian. In the 1983 words of Davis Bitton, Arrington’s former assistant:

If you visit the East Wing of the Church Office Building you will find in the hallway a gallery of portraits. These are the Church Historians, from Oliver Cowdery to G. Homer Durham. But where is Leonard Arrington? Nowhere to be seen. The official explanation is that to be a Church Historian one has to be a General Authority. A brief period of our history, awkwardly embarrassing to someone, is thus erased. Orwell’s Truthspeak did not have to wait for 1984.

There was a footnote to the Arrington era in 2001. The historian had left 700 boxes of historical documents to Utah State University before his death. When the university made the documents available to researchers, the church objected, negotiated, and reclaimed about a tenth of the collection it wanted to keep private due to special sensitivity. Reportedly the texts in question involved temple rituals, minutes kept by early church leaders and the diary of Heber Kimball, who wed eleven of Joseph Smith’s polygamous wives.

The perennial history wars persisted in 2004 when Signature Books published Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet by Dan Vogel, an assiduous researcher on early Mormon documents though not an academician, and also a skeptic in the Fawn Brodie mode. Vogel interpreted the origin of Mormon scriptures and beliefs in terms of Smith’s family experiences and psychology. LDS defenders objected that Vogel’s heavy speculations reflected his own bias against the supernatural and failed to evaluate Smith on his own terms.

The highlight of the two hundredth anniversary of the prophet’s birth the following year was publication of the radically different Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling by Richard Lyman Bushman of Columbia University. Since Bushman was a committed believer who had held ward and stake offices, the biography reflected a new maturity in Mormon history-writing. Some accused Bushman of soft-pedaling problem areas. But it is more accurate to call the work “both reverential and subversive,” as a Salt Lake Tribune reviewer commented. Bushman presented the claims of Smith and his followers at face value, but his Smith was no sanitized Saint. Bushman substantiated material that was once limited to anti-Mormon authors, such as the prophet’s involvement in folk magic and his astonishing marital career. In addition, he portrayed Smith as sometimes vindictive, abusive, needlessly authoritarian, and foolish.

“There are still Mormons who want to see (Smith) as perfection embodied, and will be surprised at his more human side,” Bushman told Publishers Weekly. Asked in an online interview whether the book would shake members’ faith, Bushman said it might not be appropriate to discuss the prophet’s character flaws in Sunday school classes, but factual candor has its place. “The disconnect can damage young Latter-day Saints who learn later in life they have not been given the whole story on church history.”