Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• Leonard wrote weekly letters to his children, usually addressing all three in the same letter. Although the real-time diary entries dwindled after 1982, these letters continued through the final years of his life, and he inserted copies of them in the diaries. They therefore constitute the most useful record of the last seventeen years of his life.
• Shortly after Grace’s death in 1982, Lavina Fielding Anderson completed a three-volume history of Leonard’s decade as church historian, Doves and Serpents: The Activities of Leonard Arrington as Church Historian, 1972–1982.
• Leonard created an atmosphere that was very welcoming of amateur historians—what he called “history buffs,” people with a deep interest in Mormon history but no formal training in historiography. I suspect that this had much to do with the fact that he himself received no formal training in the writing of history, instead earning a PhD in economics. Although he became church historian of the LDS Church, some historians never fully accepted him as one of their own, and it appears to me that he wanted to give in a way that he did not receive.
• One beneficiary of his acceptance of amateurs was Lester Bush, a physician with no formal training in historiography. As the reader will see in chapter 21, Leonard’s encouragement of Lester’s efforts, particularly his seminal article on blacks and priesthood, was deeply affirming, and Lester went on to become a major player in Mormon history, in part because of Leonard.
• Although 1974 was a good year for Mormon historians—a coworker later referred to the period nostalgically as “Camelot”—storm clouds hovered just beyond the horizon. Within two years, the tempest began. By 1982, the decade-long professionalization of the Historical Department came to an end—and with its ending came the beginning of a decade-long battle between the LDS hierarchy and Mormon intellectuals which culminated in the high-profile excommunication of the “September Six” in 1993.
• At no time during his elementary and secondary education did he have a Mormon teacher—“by deliberate policy there were no Mormon teachers in Twin Falls”—and he later saw this as a distinct advantage. “My present impression is that Mormon communities placed such stress on right thinking and right behavior that they did not always insist upon academic excellence and intellectuality.
• But for all of its earlier utility, chicken ranching was a passing fancy for Leonard. “I eagerly left it all behind—the henhouse, the chickens, the pedigreed cocks, to pursue ‘higher learning.’ My primary focus became economics, politics, literature, philosophy, and religion. I gladly embraced a new vocation, the world of scholarship—teaching and writing.”
• “I didn’t have any intellectual struggles until I went to the University of Idaho,” he recalled in a 1995 interview,16 but during the first semester biological evolution challenged his intellectual innocence. Although the LDS Church did not—and still does not—have an official doctrinal position on evolution, influential church authorities who claimed a lock on doctrinal orthodoxy were unrestrained in condemning it in the strongest terms, not bothering to label their statements as personal opinion rather than official policy. Even though other General Authorities such as scientists James E. Talmage and Joseph E. Merrill worked hard to present a more nuanced picture, Apostle Joseph Fielding Smith, who was the son of a church president, the church historian, and the author of an authoritative series of essays on gospel questions that appeared monthly in the church magazine, wrote and spoke vehemently in opposition to evolution.
• The following semester, in a paper for his freshman English class entitled “Two Arringtons,” Leonard wrote a manifesto that set him apart not only from his age peers, but also from the vast majority of his coreligionists both then and now: I am not the same Leonard Arrington I used to be. I can now make that statement with fairness both to my former self and to my present self. It would be well to compare these two selves at this stage of my college career—the Leonard Arrington that left his hopeful parents for college, and the Leonard Arrington that will go back home for the first time this June after almost a year of college influence and training… . The major change has come about through my acceptance of much of the teachings of science in preference to some of the doctrines of fundamentalists. I now accept the main outlines of the theories of evolution and behaviorism, both of which I formerly violently opposed.
• In addition to helping Leonard deal with the physical world of evolution, Tanner assisted him in dealing with the spiritual world: Brother Tanner and my major professor, Dr. [Erwin] Graue, also introduced me to George Santayana’s Reason in Religion. I do not say that I fully understood it, but the book gave me a concept that has been helpful ever since—that truth may be expressed not only through science and abstract reason, not only through scriptural texts, but also through stories, testimonies, and narratives of personal experience. Not only through erudite scholarship, but also through poetry, drama, and historical novels. Santayana used the term “myth”—a term well understood in recent religious literature—to refer to the expression of religious and moral truths in symbolic language… . Because of my introduction to the concept of symbolism as a means of expressing religious truth, I was never overly concerned with the question of the historicity of the First Vision or of the many reported epiphanies in Mormon, Christian, and Hebrew history. I was prepared to accept them as historical or as metaphorical, as symbolical or as precisely what happened.
• The cumulative effect of the week was to demonstrate to Leonard how religious questions could be discussed in a public setting in a frank, open, and informative way, without dogmatism or animosity: They [the week’s speakers] listened, were respectful of students and their questions, and discussed religious questions in a manner that was serious, meaningful, and sometimes eloquent. They did not avoid difficult problems, were willing to express personal opinions, and were skilled in utilizing humor to maintain interest and good feeling. There was no attempt to convert, no downgrading of dissenting opinions, no attempt to play on the emotions.
• Vardis Fisher’s Children of God, a novel about the history of the Mormons that won the 1939 Harper Prize in fiction.
• Part of his minor studies in agricultural economics was readings in rural sociology, one of which cited Lowry Nelson’s pivotal work, The Mormon Village. He read it with “enormous interest,” followed by an article by Juanita Brooks in Harper’s, and still more publications in the national press by Bernard DeVoto. Then, he plunged deeply into the academic literature on Mormon history, economics, and sociology, including works by Lowell Bennion, G. Homer Durham (who later became his nemesis), William Mulder, Ralph Chamberlin, Heber Snell, Franklin S. Harris, Harold Christensen, Parley Christensen, and William R. Palmer. Extending his reading into church periodicals and manuals, he took particular note of a cadre of Mormon intellectuals who had moved into the ranks of LDS General Authorities, including John A. Widtsoe (who later shaped his career), James E. Talmage, B. H. Roberts, Orson F. Whitney, Richard R. Lyman, and Joseph F. Merrill—men who provided a counterbalance to the fundamentalism that was the prevailing philosophical thread of Mormonism.
• Gibbons’s classic history Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
• “During times of change like this, one wants to be in there pitching, using whatever talents he has in a desirable way. One definitely does not want to sit in a library studying & observing while others are moving the world. At least, not me.”
• The church had taken the tack, after the death of B. H. Roberts in 1933, of usually ignoring critical or anti-Mormon works rather than engaging in two-fisted debates and “Bible bashing,” but it made an exception for Brodie. An unattributed review, running to an astounding 160 column-inches, appeared in the Church News, blasting it as “a composite of all anti-Mormon books that have gone before.”9 Some have assumed that Brodie’s book poisoned the well for other scholars attempting to use the Church Archives; but Leonard, although he must have been alarmed at the reaction to Brodie, set the record straight: “The two things wrong with this assertion are that (a) Fawn Brodie’s material is from anti-Mormon collections in the New York Public Library and elsewhere, and if she had used the materials in the Church Archives (which she did not) her book would have been very different; (b) my own experience demonstrates that the policy of restriction was not applied in 1946 or 1947, after Brodie’s book appeared, but in 1951–52 when the deluge of graduate students from BYU occurred.”
• In 1988, at a banquet commemorating the thirty-year anniversary of the publication of Great Basin Kingdom, he read a list of historical figures and historians with whom he spoke—a virtual Who’s Who of Mormon contemporary history and historiography that included William Wallace, a pioneer in Utah irrigation who told Leonard of accompanying his father to a private consultation with Brigham Young; Charles C. Richards, ninety-six years of age, who told him “about some financial dealings of the Church I wouldn’t have otherwise known about”; LeRoi C. Snow, youngest son of church president Lorenzo Snow; and historians Ephraim Ericksen, Joseph Geddes, Feramorz Y. Fox, Preston Nibley, Dale Morgan, Wilfrid Poulson, T. Edgar Lyon, Leland Creer, A. C. Lambert, and Juanita Brooks.
• Insistent on the importance of narrative—that history needed to tell a story—and the necessity of precise prose, he held Leonard’s feet to the fire and became the counterbalance enabling the transformation of a dry, data-laden economics dissertation into a compelling historical narrative and the reshaping of an economist into a historian.
• In taking the initiative to form the group, Leonard foreshadowed his later success as an “entrepreneur” of history—a term that he used to describe himself. More than a mere promoter, Leonard invested in history the way other entrepreneurs invested in business ventures. He fostered interactions between historians whose inclinations likely would have led them to seclusion rather than socialization; he brought new scholars into the field; he raised and spent money to finance projects and degrees; and he even gave freely of his own voluminous research files—largesse almost unheard of in a field where scholars jealously hoarded their research notes.
• Leonard spent another year polishing “Building the Kingdom: The Economic Activities of the Latter-day Saints.” In 1955 when he was ready to send it back to the committee, he felt generally satisfied with it, but Ellsworth took a harder look and gave him a candid assessment: “a wonderful piece of research from which a splendid history could be written.”4 The critique was withering, and it reoriented Arrington’s vision of his work: “Suddenly I realized that it was a dry book.”
• While the Mormon story may not appeal to the rational faculty of the majority as an objective picture of the world about us, there can be no doubt that, somehow or other, it tapped immense creative forces in those believing it, and that it inspired a whole commonwealth of converts to make the desert blossom as the rose.
• Occupying middle ground involved canvassing available data, letting data rather than dogma or animus define the story, and then telling the story within a compelling narrative framework. “I did not start my study with the assumption that church authorities were a bunch of rascals; neither did I start with the assumption that church authorities were angels. I hunted for all the evidence I could to determine the facts, and then presented them,” Leonard explained to a correspondent in 1959.
• Had failure been restricted to a single enterprise, one might have written it off to bad luck. The failure of multiple, strategic industries, however, called for a more fundamental explanation, and Leonard supplied it forthrightly: That in each case the church eventually assumed responsibility and control was due partly to the lack of private capital, and partly to the belief that all institutions in Mormondom ought to be under the influence of the Priesthood. While this assured a concentration of efforts in building the Kingdom, it also involved the danger of tying the hands of the “experts” who were engaged in the active management of these enterprises. Brigham Young and his appointed lay leaders were outstanding colonizers, and there can be no doubt that they were dedicated to the Kingdom, but the more the specialists depended on them for leadership, the more the specialized industries were apt to suffer from inexpert direction… . It is quite possible that the sugar, iron, and lead enterprises, and perhaps others, would have been more successful if knowledgeable private interests had been allowed a freer hand in the day-to-day direction, and a stronger voice in the making of basic decisions.19 Stated differently, economic principles had (and have) no respect for priesthood.
  • With N. Eldon Tanner, the Church began more to raise up those experts in the building of the kingdom vs subjecting them under the priesthoods authority
• Economic policy was a matter of dogma and thus was above criticism. Although Godbe, Harrison, and others had acted with the intent of moving the church and the people to a better economic position, they were excommunicated in 1869.
• In fact, it was “gentiles” who moved into the Great Basin who took advantage of the economic opportunities that the Mormons ignored and achieved such potential. Although by 1900 the vast majority of Utah’s population was still Mormon, 90 percent of the state’s millionaires were non-Mormons.
• Leonard was amused that people could not identify his religious affiliation on the basis of the book, but even he may not have realized that he was creating a middle ground that had not existed before. As the book began to circulate among historians, the range of responses, as he reflected thirty years later, brought him obvious glee: I began to get letters, complimenting me on the book and then asking me, ever so timidly, ever so obliquely, whether I was a Mormon. They suggested that they had been unable to determine my religious affiliation by reading the book. If I was a Mormon, why wasn’t the treatment more faith-promoting; if I was a Gentile, how could it be so even-handed and fair? … A professor at BYU assigned the book to the forty students in his History of Utah class and required them to write a review of it. Then, on the final exam, he asked them to assess whether the author of the book was a Mormon… . Roughly half of them concluded I was a Mormon, the other half that I was not. This was perhaps the supreme compliment that a book like this could have been given.
• After Leonard became church historian in 1972, he checked the card catalog to determine if the church even had a copy of Great Basin Kingdom. It did, but he noticed a little “a” in the corner of the card. Asking the librarian the meaning of the letter, he was told that it meant “anti-Mormon.” “Why would it have been classified as anti-Mormon?” I asked. “Well,” one person replied, “it was a scholarly book, which meant it wasn’t designed to be faith-promoting; and if it wasn’t for the Church, then, by classification, it had to be against. Moreover, it didn’t go through a Church reading committee, which meant it wasn’t approved. And if it wasn’t approved, then, by definition, it must be …” Well, you get the story.
• professor at Utah State University, a president of the Mormon History Association,
• The first was the small study group that he and George Ellsworth had formed shortly after Ellsworth joined the faculty in 1950. Ellsworth was a historian by trade, and Wendell Rich and Eugene Campbell, the other male members of the group, were deeply immersed in Mormon history as director and associate director of the LDS Institute of Religion in Logan.
• “Mormon Seminar,” a larger group being organized at the University of Utah by William Mulder and Sterling McMurrin.
• Lowell Bennion, director of the Institute of Religion at the University of Utah and probably the single most respected author and educator in the church.
• his manual, What about Religion?,
• We want to encourage you in this, hoping you can avoid the extremes of ‘chip on the shoulder’ on the one hand and trying to justify our mistakes on the other. Mormonism is hard to write about objectively and sympathetically.
• Robert B. Flanders, then the preeminent and most professional historian in the RLDS Church, whose book Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi set a high bar for other historians, recalled an almost apologetic conversation with Leonard: He said to me on [one] occasion, “You know, Bob, I’m really not a historian. I’m an economist, I’m not a historian. I’m embarrassed when people call me a historian… .” I said, “Leonard, there’s something you don’t know about history. Anybody who writes history, particularly if they write history like you write history, is a historian. This slicing and dicing of academic disciplines breaks down when it comes to history. If you write history, you are a historian. And you are a historian.” He said, “Oh.” It was kind of like he didn’t know that before. “I anoint thee historian!”
• One of the lessons that Leonard taught me was to get it done and get it out.
• Dean C. Jessee, employed by the Church Historian’s Office in 1964 and unquestionably the leading expert on Joseph Smith documents, was chastised for having written on the sensitive subject of Joseph Smith’s “First Vision”—
• Dr. Lyman Tyler, a historian who was then director of libraries at Brigham Young University.”
• James B. Allen, Davis Bitton, Truman Madsen, Kenneth Godfrey, Richard Anderson, Charles S. Peterson, T. Edgar Lyon, Robert Athearn, and Donald Moorman—the latter two not church members.
• Howard Hunter as Church Historian, possibly without consulting in advance with Joseph Fielding Smith, opened the archives completely. They had never been completely open. It had always been on a who-you-know basis. One person would come in and Will Lund would dog their notes and review them, all these horror stories that would occur. Howard Hunter changed all that in a stroke. He opened the archives.”
• LaMar Berrett, chair of the Department of Church History at Brigham Young University; James Allen, professor of history at BYU; Reed Durham, director of the LDS Institute of Religion at the University of Utah; Davis Bitton, professor of history at the University of Utah; and Leonard Arrington.
• Leonard’s interest was in learning about other people and what they were doing, thinking, and writing—not in letting them know who he was.
• Jill Mulvay Derr, another of his employees whom he enthusiastically mentored, appraised Leonard’s rare quality of spiritual stature: He was always eager to learn. If there was something new, he wanted to know about it. It was a kind of humility and curiosity that is rare in a scholar of that kind of stature… . He was quick to acknowledge and praise anything. Whatever you had written that was published, if it was your birthday, if he happened to think of you out of the blue—he would know, after I left, that I was working on a project, and he would send me money from the Mormon History Trust Fund, along with a letter of encouragement. It was always “Bravo” for the person who got out an article, or won an award, or gave a great presentation.
• We would talk, but it wasn’t narrowly on Mormon history or Western history. It was on what were the issues of the day, politics and so on. I can’t remember him ever expressing a firm anti- or pro- opinion of some big issue; rather, he just analyzed it.
• Leonard would inevitably seek anyone from Utah and then announce, “We’ve got to have a rump session.” The format was set: “It started out small, maybe 10, but sometimes there would be 25 or 30 people there. He would want to go around the circle and find out exactly what everybody was doing. He wouldn’t rest until he knew what everybody was doing… . Unless you understand that part of his personality, you don’t understand him.”
• For Robert Flanders, the road to pariah status involved his doctoral dissertation, which eventually was published as the groundbreaking Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi.
• His son James recalled: I believe that his writing style, on that old, manual Olympic typewriter, was a kinesthetic way that he wrote. He couldn’t write on a computer. He could write longhand, but that was notes. His way of writing was on that old thing, and he got into a rhythm as he would type. You could hear it, and it had to do with slapping back the carriage. He had this rhythm that he would write in, and I believe that he stayed writing on that old Olympic because he liked to do that. With a computer, you don’t ever do that. To him, it was some kinesthetic part of the physicality of writing. Writing was a physical thing for him.
• His daughter, whose bedroom was next to his, remembered, “Literally every night I went to bed hearing that manual typewriter go, and that little bell at the end that says it’s time to return the carriage. Almost any time of night, if I got up for whatever reason, he was in his study.”
• Mormons and Their Historians, that he and Davis Bitton did together.
• Not long after having this epiphany, Leonard began an intellectual wrestling match with his religion that continued throughout his life. He accepted that he was “wired” for questioning, and while he was passive in school, “where we were supposed to accept what the teacher said,” he considered his religion to be fair game. “I would say that my spirit of questioning arose from my Mormonism. Questions in Sunday School, in MIA, in Priesthood quorums. Far more questioning than in school.”
• Joseph Smith, An American Prophet, by John Henry Evans. “The book portrays Joseph Smith as a person with an open mind, a questioning mind, a person in pursuit of education and knowledge. I accepted this as representing the spirit of Mormonism, and still hold to it.”
• He taught Leonard the lesson he had learned: to be a Christian first, and a Mormon second. “There are so many Mormons who give first emphasis to the unique or distinctive doctrines and practices of Mormonism. And this is wrong, very wrong, if we are in truth restored Christianity.”
• Leonard’s road through these questions to a decision by which he could steer his life was intellectual—a legitimate road, but one foreign to many of his coreligionists, who relied (and rely) more on feeling than intellect. Leonard did not denigrate the legitimacy of religious conviction based upon feeling, nor did he rule out feeling as part of his own conviction. Nonetheless, he made it clear that intellect was the key to his own. He reflected on his own spiritual development in a 1983 essay that began with a frank assertion: Let me confess at the beginning that I believe the intellect is enormously important—more important than the heart, more important than tradition. If my mind could not confirm the truth of my religion, I would be disturbed, uncertain, and confused. Nevertheless, as you will see, I feel very comfortable with poetry, music, art, drama, testimony, ritual, ceremony, and other expressions of religious feeling and thought. I am also comfortable with people who contend that religion is a matter of spirit, not mind, and that testimonies can come only through the assurances of the Holy Ghost.
• He gave credit to George Tanner for having helped him initiate that process of intellectual conversion. “He oriented us on ‘the Higher Orientation.’ This had been around for about 100 years, but was new to me, as it was to most LDS students. This is the literary-historical study of the Bible, seeking to determine such factors as authorship, date, place of origin, circumstances of composition, purpose of author, and historical credibility of each of the writings, together with the meaning intended by their authors.”
• Leonard read widely, not only the books recommended by George Tanner, but also a broad spectrum of nonfiction and fiction that included works by Mormon intellectuals such as James E. Talmage, John A. Widtsoe, and Lowell Bennion; Christian philosophers, notably John Henry Newman; and religious and philosophical novels such as Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903), Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915), and George Santayana’s The Last Puritan (1935). But the most important was another of Santayana’s books: The Life of Reason: Reason in Religion (1905). Raised in a church that took primarily a fundamentalist viewpoint of the scriptures—that the scriptures were inerrant, not self-contradictory, and contained only literal truth—Leonard had already come to realize that such a viewpoint could not withstand the scientific scrutiny of historical-critical methodology. Reason in Religion became his Rosetta Stone for deeper understanding. He bought his own copy in 1937, not an insignificant purchase for a student who did his own laundry by hand. “The book was very influential for me; it helped me to see that one might be a sincere believer in Mormonism and at the same time accept the findings of the brightest intellects, whether in philosophy, or science, or the humanities. In particular, Reason in Religion helped me to understand that it isn’t important whether certain religious or theological affirmations are truths in a literal sense, or whether they are true in a symbolic or poetic sense.” The ability to see truth as being both symbolic and literal, and to understand that one kind did not work against the other, set Leonard apart from most of his coreligionists. Indeed, he went the next step by realizing that both kinds of truth are essential to a balanced faith. “While religious doctrines may be right symbolically, they should not be substituted for scientific truth. At the same time, those who accept scientific truth as the only truth, as the final truth, end up substituting inadequate personal symbols which are unsatisfying and unedifying.” Santayana introduced Leonard to the ideas of “myth” and “mythical truth,” concepts that continue to escape many of his faith tradition. As a result he had “no difficulty in trying to harmonize religious assertions with scientific ‘truth.’”
• He looked forward to the thoughtful openness and well-informed perspective that prevailed in Tanner’s Institute of Religion classes. “When we raised questions about the theory of evolution, about mechanistic psychology, about modern criticism, he responded with long, educated answers that reinforced our faith.”
• Almost fifty years later, he still quoted Tanner’s maxims: “‘Our faith was built on the firm rock of truth. Truth is truth, and the Lord never requires us to believe anything that is not true,’ he would say.
• Leonard found later that, while secular and religious truths may be in perfect harmony, determining what is entitled to the label of “truth” is an extremely difficult, sometimes impossible, and always threatening process.
• Indeed, the interface between science and religion over the past century is largely the story of religious assertions retreating in the face of scientific discovery, a story that Leonard’s black-and-white college worldview was ill-equipped to process.
• He read extensively, paying particular attention to a church lesson written by Lowell Bennion, What About Religion?, that portrayed Mormonism as representing truth and enlightenment, rather than superstition and ignorance. “The manual also quoted with approval Brigham Young’s statements that we accept truth no matter where it comes from, that Mormonism comprises all truth including truths that are taught in the various arts and sciences, and that there is an indissoluble relationship between religion and learning. These became articles of my religious faith and continue to remain so.”
• Shirley Jackson Case, Jesus: A New Biography; Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus; Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus; and James E. Talmage, Jesus the Christ.”
• “My own experience as a university student and professor suggests that the emphasis on the spirit, the ‘put down’ of the intellect, does a disservice to religion in general and to Mormonism in particular, for it suggests that religion—Mormonism—cannot be intellectually supported; its support rests on an emotional basis; one must put one’s mind aside to accept its truths. This is palpably false. Or at least this is my own experience.”
• Decades later he wrote to his children: “Today, as a by-product of a search for something else, I ran across a box that had the cards I used in my talks on religious themes when I was on the USU High Council and in the Stake Presidency. Perhaps as many as forty or fifty different talks, all delivered in Logan. I realize now that every talk I have given since coming here was on a history topic. Not a single talk with a religious theme.”
• Leonard was too modest in saying none of these talks had a religious theme: history was religion in Cache Valley.
• “There is no question that this is the True Church. Otherwise, we wouldn’t ever have [survived].”
• He leaned up and he said, “Brothers and sisters, I have seen the things of the Church. I have seen the deepest parts of the Church, and I can tell you that it is inspired, and there is nothing in there for us to be ashamed of.”
• His role model was George A. Smith, an apostle and counselor in the First Presidency from the previous century, who was “impatient with ceremony and did not hesitate to end long meetings with the prayer, ‘Lord, forgive us and continue to bless us. Amen!’”
• Leonard made a point of confiding to Daines, “You and I have often chatted about what’s in the First Presidency vault. I have seen everything. I think I have actually been able to see it all, and I don’t think they’ve held anything back. I want you to know that I have a strong testimony, that nothing I saw bothered my testimony. I don’t have any problems sustaining this prophet or anyone that comes after him. I have seen it all, and I am deepened in my beliefs.” Daines was struck by Leonard’s earnestness and commented, “You can misinterpret that by saying that he believed that every Church leader was right. Quite the opposite. But Leonard wanted to communicate that to me that there wasn’t something there that he felt substantially changed his views.”
• “He was able to view the people that he dealt with in the same way that he was able to view Brigham Young or Charles C. Rich or the guys that had lived a hundred years earlier,” commented a fellow USU professor, Ross Peterson. He knew “that they were human beings, that they were trying to do a job, they were making some mistakes, they’d step on people. And that’s just the way it was. It had nothing to do with the person’s relationship to Jesus Christ or to the Church.”
• Michael Quinn recalled that Leonard was flying back from a meeting and using the plane-time to read A View of the Hebrews. As luck would have it his seatmate was an acquaintance and “a devout Mormon.” Intrigued by Leonard’s reading material, this “person was kind of looking over his shoulder—but as Leonard would come across something that he thought was interesting, he would mention it to this person, because Leonard found it interesting. Just interesting.” This pattern had been going on for some time through the flight when Leonard suddenly realized, “with a sense of real surprise, … that this person was having a faith crisis” over some of the details that Leonard found mildly interesting. This reaction “astounded Leonard… . whose statement was, ‘It was just a book!’” Quinn reflected: “But in that experience, maybe for the first time in his life, even though he had run into various kinds of criticism, I don’t think he had ever seen somebody begin to crumble in their faith, in front of him. And that’s what he saw in this person next to him. It really shocked him. It really, really got to him. I think that’s the first time that he really ever got it, that history could really be dangerous. And he was Church Historian before he saw that.”
• His refusal to be ruffled ran headlong into the orthodoxy of fundamentalist church leaders such as Bruce McConkie, Joseph Fielding Smith, and Mark E. Petersen, an orthodoxy that refused to see as acceptable anything but a literal interpretation.
• In 1921 William Riter, a young man from Salina, Utah, relayed to LDS apostle James E. Talmage five questions about historical aspects of the Book of Mormon that had been sent to him by a Mr. Couch of Washington, D.C. Talmage asked B. H. Roberts, a fellow General Authority and one of the brightest intellectuals in the history of the LDS Church, to respond to the questions. After studying them for nearly two months, Roberts wrote a sobering response addressed to his fellow General Authorities, including church president Heber J. Grant: “I very gladly undertook the task of considering the question here propounded, and hoped to find answers that would be satisfactory,” he began. “As I proceeded with my recent investigations, however, and more especially in the, to me, new field of language problems, I found the difficulties more serious than I had thought for; and the more I investigated the more difficult I found the formulation of an answer to Mr. Couch’s inquiries to be.”
• In the late 1970s, members of his family gave the book-length manuscript to the Marriott Library of the University of Utah, and in 1985 it was published, edited by well-regarded historian Brigham D. Madsen, who squarely faced the difficult questions Roberts raised.
• BYU anthropology professor John Sorenson and later published as An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon.
• The author, Blake Ostler, sidestepped Sorenson’s literalistic interpretation and offered a hybrid, “a theory of the Book of Mormon as Joseph Smith’s expansion of an ancient work by building on the work of ancient prophets to answer nagging problems of his day. The result is a modern world view and theological understanding superimposed on the Book of Mormon text from the plates.” By allowing for both ancient and modern components, Ostler’s construct allowed Leonard “to believe in the gold plates, as I have done (the evidence is overwhelming that they existed), and in the evidences of ancientness in the text (there are lots of those), and at the same time have a suitable explanation of the modernisms (and there are certainly some of those).” Ostler’s “creative co-participation theory of revelation,” in which Smith was an active, rather than passive instrument in producing the Book of Mormon, fit nicely “a view of revelation which the historian is almost forced to accept.”
• Durham, a former university president, had been welcomed as someone who would understand and defend the production of serious and professional Mormon history; but his actual behavior was a shattering disappointment. He had been instructed to dismantle the department and did so with enthusiasm, acting directly on instructions from his mentor, Gordon B. Hinckley.
• “Having doubts, having fears, having reservations about counsel is not necessarily an opening wedge toward the loss of faith. Indeed, it might be the avenue to renewed faith, deeper faith, greater understanding. ‘No one truly believes who has not first served an apprenticeship of doubt.’”
• “The attempt to suppress problems and difficulties, the attempt to intimidate people who raise problems or express doubts or seek to reconcile difficult facts, is both ineffective and futile. It leads to suspicion, mistrust, the condescending slanting of data. The more we deny or appear to deny certain demonstrable ‘facts,’ the more we must ourselves harbor serious doubts and have something to hide.”
• In 1983 he wrote an essay, “Why I Am a Believer,” the first of a series called “Pillars of My Faith,” delivered in a plenary session of the Sunstone Symposium and later printed in Sunstone magazine. Although it was a restatement of earlier writings and speeches, it achieved new—and dubious—status not only for being in print, but for having been published in a magazine disdained by many orthodox Mormons.
• “I was not satisfied until I had studied the matter through and came to a conviction that my intellect could defend.” As he had noted on prior occasions, by the third year of his graduate studies he had satisfied himself, through intellectual inquiry, that God existed. “My religious experiences in my more mature years have merely served to corroborate what I had then come to believe.”
• “One’s testimony of the Gospel is an intensely personal thing. Arguing with it is like arguing with his or her choice of a spouse, his or her taste in art, his or her preference for Verdi over Wagner. It is a product of one’s feeling at a particular moment—feeling about God, feeling about the Church, feeling about one’s fellowmen.”
• “Let me say that those of us who have worked long and thoroughly in the Church Archives have had our testimonies strengthened, and deepened. All of us know for a surety (having examined the most intimate documents) that the Church is of divine origin, and that the Prophets speak with, or have spoken with, God… . No conflict there.”
• There are LDS families in which loyalty to Mormon doctrines, practices, and leaders is so strong that the children feel they have to conform in order to assure the love of their parents. The parents love the church more than their children. Children sense that the parents would choose the church over their children if there was that choice.
• In a late-night conversation in Philadelphia after a day of sessions at a history meeting in 1969, Leonard discussed with two other scholars the existence of two Mormon churches, “the formal church of Sacrament meeting, Sunday School, MIA, etc., and the Underground church. The latter is the church of study groups, circles, discussions groups, family get-togethers, etc. where there is Christian fellowship with ideological similar[ity], both within and without the Church.” Though not described in any church manual, the underground church, according to Leonard, has existed since the church was founded in the 1830s. “The Church has survived despite its formal church life. There has always been an underground. The church could eliminate much of the organized life—SS, MIA, Priesthood groups, etc., and there will still be a church because the essence of the church is in the underground group life.”
• Cannon-Hinckley Church History Club,
• Leonard considered the underground church to be a sign of institutional health, for it was (and generally is) composed of church members who feel deeply about the gospel, but who have no outlet within the formal church structure for discussing many of the issues that are of greatest importance to them. “One can’t raise meaningful questions or discuss them honestly and fully in SS, seminary, Institute, MIA, Sacrament meeting, etc. So congenial and kindred souls meet in dinner parties at homes, fireside groups, study groups, vacation groups, and at professional and trade conventions.
• Heavily documented, the article argued persuasively that Brigham Young’s enforcement of the Word of Wisdom as a binding commandment, rather than as the “good advice” that it had been for decades, was driven by the need to keep scarce cash in Utah Territory; and a proscription on the purchase and use of “luxury goods” such as tobacco, tea, coffee, and alcoholic beverages, which were imported from the States, was a good way to do so.
• Instead, they preferred a Mormon equivalent to “the Jewish Commentary, the Catholic America, and the Protestant Christian Century.”
• “What brings you to the MHA?” She said, “Oh—well this is where it’s happening.” I encouraged her to go on with that thought. She said, “Well, these people here are really interesting. They’ve got new ideas.” I remember that term, “new ideas.” She went on to say, without any hint of derogation at all, that “Nothing else new is happening, so here I am.”
• “There are a lot of people at MHA like that. They have no professional involvement; they just find it interesting. That’s where ‘it’s happening.’ I know of no analogy for that anywhere else.”
• I kept wishing there was a Latter-day Saint scholarly journal—an outlet for thoughtful articles by Latter-day Saint chemists, physicists, economists, sociologists, historians, lovers of literature, and lovers of art. I had no doubt that Mormonism—the Gospel of Jesus Christ—was exalting and that Mormon professionals could demonstrate the superiority of our doctrine and way of life in every aspect of thought.”
• Our combined experience in many universities has made us keenly aware of the intellectual pressures on our youth. We believe that to hold them we must speak with many voices. A straightforward testimony by a man of spiritual power is most effective; Institute classes and the church schools help a large number. Unfortunately, these methods do not reach certain ones, including some of the finest students. Often these are overawed by the brilliance of secular culture. By comparison their own beliefs, as they perceive them, seem embarrassingly unsophisticated. They ascribe intellectual superficiality to Latter-day Saints and the Gospel itself and feel compelled to choose reason over faith.
• According to Devery S. Anderson’s history of Dialogue’s early years, Hinckley, “sensitive to church coverage in the press” that had focused on the church’s increasingly controversial refusal to ordain black men to the priesthood, combined a stake conference in San Mateo, California, with a private meeting on the preceding Saturday evening with Gene England. Hinckley had read the two New York Times articles, concluding “that Dialogue’s aim was to attempt to speak with finality on Mormon issues. England responded to their conversation in a follow-up letter: ‘I can’t emphasize too strongly that Dialogue is not a theological journal or anything remotely like one; when we talk about a journal of Mormon thought, we are not talking about the Mormon position on any doctrine.’”
• It was clear from the discussion that about half of the brethren were in favor of supporting publishing in Dialogue and the others were opposed to it. Brother Benson saw this cleavage, this division and brought his hand down firmly on the table and said that he thought this kind of thing should be done: he thought that Dialogue should be burned. President McKay, who had said nothing during the discussion suddenly stood up and said, “Let me say this[,] brethren, that this Church is not about to burn any publication. We have no business burning books and if we should burn a publication of this nature then to be consistent we ought to burn some of the books of brethren in this room who have published books.” So that ended the discussion.
• Stephen Taggart, an undergraduate at the University of Utah, wrote and submitted to Dialogue a manuscript that challenged the church policy on historical grounds and made public a recent letter written by Sterling McMurrin to Llewelyn McKay, President McKay’s second-oldest son. McMurrin described a 1954 meeting in which President McKay said that the policy was a practice and not a doctrine. A “practice,” in the minds of some, including First Counselor Hugh B. Brown, who had been given a copy of Taggart’s manuscript, suggested the possibility of change, whereas a “doctrine” did not.
• Lester Bush wrote a lengthy critique of the manuscript that was published in Dialogue and that set the stage for his own game-changing article on the subject several years later.
• He thus reversed more than a century of exclusion based upon shaky theology and historical tradition and, what is more, did it in a way that brought the Quorum of the Twelve to a unified decision instead of creating division and abrasive internal relationship. Even the charismatic David O. McKay had failed to achieve this goal, despite his personal conviction that black exclusion was a policy, not a doctrine.
• Benson thus lined up with Joseph Fielding Smith in being wary of innovation and protective of the oversimplified and iconic triumphalist history in which “the hand of the Lord” was conspicuously and constantly visible.
• The Historical Department was one of the first to change. Elder Hunter said that he felt that the Church was mature enough that our history should be honest. He did not believe in suppressing information, nor hiding documents, nor concealing or withholding minutes for possible scrutiny. He excluded from this, however, people who were setting out diligently to discredit the Church. The only name he mentioned under that heading was Gerald [Jerald] and Sandra Tanner.24 He thought the best way to answer anti-Mormonism is to print the truth. He thought we should publish the documents of our history. He did not see any reason to conceal the minutes of the Council of 50.25 “Why not disclose them?” he asked. “They are a part of our history, why should we withhold things that are a part of our history?” He thought it in our best interest to encourage scholars—to help and cooperate with them in doing honest research.
• “On the one hand, I am the Church Historian and must seek to build testimonies, spread the Word, build the Kingdom. On the other hand, I am called to be a historian, which means that I must earn the respect of professional historians—what I write must be craftsman like, credible, and of good quality. This means that I stand on two legs—the leg of faith and the leg of reason.”
• Wallace Stegner (Mormon Country, 1942); Bernard DeVoto (The Year of Decision: 1846, 1943); Fawn Brodie (No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon Prophet, 1945); Dale Morgan (The Great Salt Lake, 1947); and Juanita Brooks (The Mountain Meadows Massacre, 1950).
• It did not reflect a low opinion of Mormon’s historical role or contributions. “Things don’t get into the textbooks until there is a significant body of scholarly writing about the subject that one cannot ignore. And who is to blame for this? No one but ourselves for not doing our homework adequately and effectively.”
• They needed to be employed in the service of history, and those, like Arrington, who were “sponsoring Dialogue, the Mormon History Association, and other similar professional activities,” were confident “that the Church and its membership are now sufficiently ‘mature’ to accept our findings, even when adverse, as part of the process of obtaining understanding and truth.”
• It recommended the involvement in the project of “the heterodox and hostile.” As Bushman noted, “Some of them are acute students of our history and can make useful suggestions.” He further reasoned that “though the finished product will be the work of friendly historians, we will defeat one of the purposes of the project if we do not thoroughly investigate areas our critics think discredit the Church.”
• Romney viewed history as a tool to be used by church leaders to carry out their agenda, rather than a stand-alone discipline whose primary driving force is data, rather than dogma. Sanctioning a rewriting of history by professional historians would shift control away from the ecclesiastical arm of the church, where it had always resided—a dangerous move. Boyd Packer later summarized this viewpoint with remarkable candor when he said, “Some things that are true are not very useful.”
• The list was essentially a Who’s Who of scholars of Mormonism: I. Introduction and Background to 1830—Richard Bushman II. The Ohio Experience to 1838—Milton V. Backman Jr. III. The Missouri Experience to 1839—Max Parkin IV. The Illinois Period, 1839–1846—T. Edgar Lyon V. The Crossing of the Plains—Reed C. Durham Jr. VI. The Early Pioneer Period, 1847–1869—Eugene E. Campbell VII. The Later Pioneer Period, 1869–1900—Charles S. Peterson VIII. The Early Twentieth Century, 1900–1930—Thomas G. Alexander IX. The Church from 1930 to 1950—Richard O. Cowan X. The Contemporary Church, 1950–1980—James B. Allen XI. A History of the Latter-day Saints in Europe—Douglas F. Tobler XII. A History of the Latter-day Saints in Asia and the Pacific—R. Lanier Britsch XIII. A History of the Latter-day Saints in Mexico, Central, and South America—F. Lamond Tullis XIV. A History of the Expansion of the Faith—S. George Ellsworth XV. A Social and Cultural History of the Church, 1830–1900—Davis Bitton XVI. A Social and Cultural History of the Church, 1901–1972—John L. Sorenson60
• much of the history contained in the oral histories would otherwise have gone unrecorded, for the paradoxical reason that, in spite of the ease with which written records can now be made—there are even software programs that translate speech into text in real time—people make far fewer written records than their ancestors, who regularly wrote letters and diaries.
• If we are anything, we are an organization dedicated to finding the truth about the Church and its history and we have complete faith that the Church will in the long run not suffer as the result of this activity… . I do not see how we can successfully counteract anti-Mormon articles and books without knowing the extent to which they are based on correct information, nor can I conceive of persons having confidence in our own publications unless they know that we are pursuing all avenues in the attempt to find out what really happened.
• Leonard reached back to the goal expressed by George Tanner, his college Institute of Religion advisor, to help “my students to see life’s real problems instead of having to butter everything up for them. The Church does Institute students a disservice by not teaching things realistically. When they get out in life they will have to face up to reality; we should prepare them for it.”
• One former undergraduate recalled how Leonard, who was both his advisor and a member of his ward, gave a homily to the Sunday School faculty at a prayer meeting: “It was something to the effect that we needed to inoculate people—and I think he was thinking about young people, as well as anybody else—by giving them exposure to facets of the history of the Church that might be uncomfortable. In becoming able to accommodate this … they would be in a better position to deal with the tougher stuff as that came along.
• Leonard put it even more succinctly: “God does not need our lies.”
• “Do we really want to publish the truth about Church history?” He replied, “Of course we want the truth in Church history, and those of us who have worked intimately with the documents … are confident that the truth is palatable and basically, if not completely, faith promoting; and that is the way it should be, shouldn’t it, if this really is the Lord’s Church?” He assured his correspondent that he saw “no conflict between my integrity as a scholar and my faith as a Latter-day Saint.”
• They, like Leonard, “had enough faith to believe that trying to tell a fuller story, and not just the mythic tale, would in the long run be healthy for the Church.” Moreover, they perceived “that this was coming in any case, and it was probably better to have some faithful church members involved in doing it.”
• The key to success could be summarized in one word, context, for everything: “what they knew, what their lives were like, how they were trying to accomplish things or just get by. That’s a good lesson… . You can’t take a standard today and put it on the people who were around 150 years ago.”
• But the fact is that the truth is the truth, and there is no reason to hide it. The more truth we know, the more we understand things. For my whole history, I have tried the best I can to keep things out from under the rug, because that is where it functions. It’s the anti-Mormons, now, who are putting things under the rug. They tell half-truths.”
• Leonard said, “Our history is the history of not just the Church, but of human beings and of men and women. Men and women are imperfect, but that doesn’t mean the Church isn’t true.”
• There was a wonderful sense of esprit de corps among the historians in those early days. Davis Bitton referred to it as Camelot. There was lots of excitement; it was really kind of an electric time. Everyone was really excited about what they were doing. I think everyone felt that they were doing a tremendous service to the Church. There was no sense of people being sneaky or that they were going to prove anything to people or make trouble. It was a very positive culture that [Leonard] had developed there, and that grew. I always thought afterwards, when people sort of criticized the Historical Department as though it was a hotbed of radical troublemakers—these people were all bishops, they were active. It was really, really positive, and the loyalty to the Church was just sort of unquestionable. These were people who thought they were doing a great service to the Church… .
• If their historical perception is clouded by myth and misunderstanding, and if their faith in the Church is such that any little bit of surprising information about Church history would shake it,” the historians sought to help them understand “so well that historical problems no longer bother them.”
• Concerns over turf were coupled with a not-invented-here mentality that looked for all initiatives to begin at the top,9 rather than harness the creative energy at the bottom. “Nothing could put more strains on imaginative programming than the feeling that if it did not come from a General Authority, it should not have been thought of. It is suspect immediately if it comes from any other source.”
• An unusual, almost unique feature of the Mormon Church is the enormously deep body of documentary history that goes back to the founding days of the church in 1830. Although the church carefully collected and preserved those documents, for many decades they were ignored as deference was given to outdated, apologetic published histories. Leonard and his colleagues, nearly all of whom had graduate degrees in history and related fields, came into their new jobs already well versed in Mormon history; and they quickly became expert in new areas as they plowed through thousands of pages of documentary materials that had laid unexamined. People in the church hierarchy who were not well read in the manuscript history were at a disadvantage, and their response to the new versions of history was often one of self-protective (or turf-protective) reflex that invariably was counterproductive to Leonard’s plans.
• Particularly annoying to Leonard were the opportunities lost when General Authorities failed to grasp how powerful the history would have been in the conduct of their business. “Instead,” he lamented, “[they] rely on legalistic pronouncements and coercive administrative power. I have never seen a group of people so afraid to do something, so fearful of doing wrong, terrorized by the possibility of vindictiveness. And this is a Church!”
• “I write an article on the Word of Wisdom. Someone complains to a General Authority. The General Authority writes to the president of BYU. The president of BYU calls the dean. The dean calls me in. The dean tells me it looks O.K. to him, but since the general authority complained, I must write him a letter of apology. This is the way to be creative? This is the way of academic freedom? This is the way of history?”
• “I was not prepared for the lack of historical training, the lack of appreciation of those who did have professional training, the lack of tolerance for new suggestions, new approaches, new contributions, new publications. I began to wonder. Better to put up with a few smokers and anti-Mormons than the spies and anti-intellectuals in the Church Office Building.”
• Rather than working in a conciliatory way with bureaucrats above his pay grade, he adopted a confrontational posture that worked against him—and although he realized that it would do so, he pursued such a course anyway, imbued with a sense of mission that likely blinded him to the dangers of such an approach: “The Church of the future will be grateful for what we do, we must do it even by fighting the bureaucracy, and we must expect to lose many of our fights with officialdom, and expect heavy criticism. But in the interest of the Church, in the interest of the Lord, we should persevere.”
• What Leonard failed to realize, and what likely would have reshaped the outcome of the History Division had he realized it from the start, was that the church—or any church—is an organization, and the larger the organization, the more predictably its bureaucracy will act. One of Leonard’s colleagues, a professor at the University of Utah, stated the matter succinctly: “I talked with Bob Hales when he came from a corporation in the East and was appointed an apostle.24 He was on the board of regents, and I met him there. I said to him, ‘What is the difference between being a corporate executive, at a high level, and being an apostle in the Church?’ He said, ‘None.’ I think that goes to part of the matter.”
  • Contrast Eyring comment
• “History buffs meeting and knowing each other can encourage study and stimulate thought among themselves. By meeting regularly to hear from established scholars, they can keep current on new findings and interpretations in the field.”
• “I have the feeling that many LDS university students of my generation and a generation earlier who left the Church, really left, not just Mormonism, but religion. And may one reason have been the failure of our faith to preach and teach religion, along with theology and the unique elements of our faith[?]” He saw Dialogue, Sunstone, Exponent II, and even BYU Studies as providing LDS young people, in particular, “the opportunity to have intellectual discussion of history, doctrine, practices, and activity.”
• While Dialogue held a special place in Leonard’s universe, he also was strongly supportive of the other journals focusing on the Latter-day Saint tradition that emerged in its wake: Courage: A Journal of History, Thought and Action (published by members of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, 1970–1973), the Journal of Mormon History (1974–present), Exponent II (1974–present), Sunstone (1975–present), John Whitmer Historical Association Journal (1981–present), and Seventh East Press (1981–1983).
• Assistant Church Historian James Allen remarked, “People don’t realize how many young scholars got their start as a result of having had a fellowship from Leonard Arrington… . Marv Hill, Richard Bushman, Dave Whittaker, and Jill Mulvay Derr… . Jessie Embry came in as a research fellow and as a research assistant.
• Part of the way Leonard encouraged his peers was to read what they were publishing and then write appreciative letters to them. “Leonard was good at reading every journal that came, the day it came,” recalled Glen Leonard, one of the History Division’s employees and later director of the LDS History Museum. Then, also often the same day, Leonard would write “letters to each author to congratulate him for what he did.”
• I didn’t think anybody would ever see it. A couple of days after that appeared, here came a nice letter from Leonard, thanking me for that and telling me how what I had experienced was very similar to what he had known in Idaho. I think the number of people who received letters like that are probably legion. Leonard supported everybody.
• But Leonard’s most unusual—and in a way most impressive—mentorship occurred when he took an active role in assisting interested amateurs with no relevant degree—“history buffs,” as he called them—in researching and writing history. The only prerequisite was genuine interest, which in one case began in a most improbable fashion and went on to succeed beyond his wildest expectations.
• “He would reach out all over the place to these people. He was just incredible that way. His Christmas card list got up to about 5,000. It was huge! He taught me something about networking. He just collected friends, everywhere he went.”
• Part of Leonard’s “secret,” if one could call it such, was to gather people together in his hotel room in the evening for his famed “rump sessions.” Robert Flanders described one such session that occurred at a meeting in Montana, just as his landmark and controversial book, Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi, was going to press. “That was my first late-night meeting with Leonard and his protégés. I was invited. Leonard was the only one, of course, who knew about Kingdom on the Mississippi, because he had read it in manuscript. But that’s not what the meeting was about. The meeting was about meeting. Here were all these young guys. I don’t remember who all they were. The important thing was that I saw Leonard as the leader of this little group.”
• “After the sessions he would bring a bunch of people into his hotel room and they would sit around and talk. He’d point to you and say, ‘What are you doing now?’ Before long, everybody was offering everybody suggestions.”
• He called himself an entrepreneur. He created Mormon historians by sharing his information with them, by pushing them into projects that they didn’t know they were interested in, by facilitating the research.
• “Blessed Damozels: Women in Mormon History.” A colleague who attended the meeting recalled the impression it left with him even after the passage of forty years: “Just stunning! What he said was, ‘This mythology about beat-up women in Mormonism, who had to endure the Hell of polygamy, is a bunch of hogwash.’ Of course, he said it very beautifully and elegantly, but he said, ‘The women of Mormonism are strong, powerful women.’ He explained how the economics of polygamy made for strong women. Demanded it. It was essential.”
• Knopf book, The Mormon Experience,
• Martha Spence Heywood’s journal, where she talks about Brigham Young saying that ‘a woman, be she ever so smart, will never know more than a man who holds the priesthood.’ Maureen [Beecher] and I had included that in the chapter to reflect the tensions that some of the rhetoric caused for very intelligent women as they tried to operate within a system where they needed to obey priesthood leaders, but they sometimes disagreed.”
• As one of the sisters wrote, ‘We had to endure all that the brethren endured, and we had to endure the brethren as well.’”
• Less than five months after being sustained in general conference as church historian, Leonard wrote of the changes he had already effected: “We have switched from writing elitist history to writing the history of ordinary members of the Church and their concerns—their housing, their food, their clothing, their recreation, their associations, etc. In all of this, the role of women is clear, definite, and undeniable. We are more interested in women than before and, therefore, are studying women’s letters, women’s diaries, and the lives of women.”
• Upon learning that Bushman had embarked on a graduate degree, Leonard continued his serious support. “I was thinking that I would do female studies, which was something none of us had ever heard about at that point. It didn’t exist, but I thought I would study the lives of women of the past, using myself as a marker, a comparison.” Her husband, Richard, happened to mention this in conversation with Leonard at a history meeting. “A couple of days later I [got] from Leonard, whom I had never met, a long letter, a very long letter, very personal, very warm, all kinds of suggestions of possible things that I could do, all kinds of sources that I might look at, all kinds of people I should get in touch with, sending me documents.”
• With the death of church president David O. McKay in 1970, the fortunes of the Relief Society began to change. Within months of McKay’s death in January of that year, male church leaders discontinued the Relief Society Magazine, cancelled independent Relief Society fund-raising events including bazaars, and directed that Relief Society bank accounts be closed and the monies turned over to male-controlled general and local accounts.
• The year 1974 was the end of an era, for Belle Spafford was released from her record-setting tenure of twenty-nine years. Her successors served an average of less than six years each and, during Gordon Hinckley’s administration, the presidencies of the women’s three auxiliaries were standardized to five years, unlike the “until death” service of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.
• In his first press conference after becoming the twelfth church president in December 1973, Spencer W. Kimball responded to a reporter’s question in a manner that sent a clear message to those women who had not already heard it through the church’s earlier initiatives. The question: “Will there be a change in attitude toward women?” The answer: “Not too abruptly. We believe that the ideal place for women is in the home.”
  • It’s odd, isn’t it? Because we also believe the ideal role of the Church is to provide access to agency-enabling ordinances and leave people to exercise their God-given agency to choose. Why would that include dictating what familial arrangements their members make?
• Since the death of McKay, Harold B. Lee had used the Correlation movement to bring church departments under the direct supervision of the Quorum of the Twelve—the Relief Society being no exception. “The Priesthood” thus controlled everything—even the telling of church history.
• But even more painful than “a gift not given” was a gift that, once given, was taken away. Leonard recorded that Dennis Lythgoe, a bishop in a Boston suburb, wanted to appoint a woman as president of the ward Sunday School. “He looked through all the manuals of instruction and couldn’t see anything that specifically prohibited it. Upon inquiry with his high council representative and stake president, he learned that they also, could see no reason this should not be done, particularly in view of the fact that one of the other wards in the stake had a black as president of the Sunday School who held no priesthood, and another ward had a person who held only the Aaronic Priesthood as president.” With the green light from his stake president, Lythgoe called a woman to the position of Sunday School president. She, in turn, chose as counselors one woman and one man. “The Sunday School functioned very well”—so well, in fact, that another bishop in the same stake wanted to do the same thing. A person in that ward, however, apparently troubled by the unprecedented arrangement of a woman “presiding” over a man, complained to the area supervisor, Rex Pinegar, who referred the matter to the Quorum of the Twelve. “The Quorum of Twelve then discussed the matter and informed Elder Pinegar to inform the stake president to inform the bishop that this was not a proper procedure and that he would have to release the sister.” Lythgoe appealed to his former stake president, L. Tom Perry, who was by then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve. “Elder Perry wrote back a rather curt letter saying that he had not been present when the Quorum of Twelve discussed it but he verified that it had been discussed and that the minutes indicated the decision that Elder Pinegar had conveyed to them… . So Bishop Lythgoe will be releasing the sister, and, as he expressed, ‘We have taken a step backwards.’”
• In a foreshadowing of the situation in the contemporary LDS Church, wherein only a small minority of women desire ordination to the priesthood,47 “she has never thought that women ought to hold the priesthood, and thinks that that is an extraneous issue… . It is just that they be regarded as equals—as not inferior. It is just that women ought to participate in the decision-making process that affects them. They ought to have some say in the decisions of the ward, the stake, and the Church generally.”
• “She called to tell me she did not think the time was ripe to publish a history of the Relief Society. She thought this would be too damaging to the testimonies of LDS women who would read it because, if it tells the truth, it will relate the deterioration of the power and position of women in the Church and will be very depressing to women who care.”
• While Leonard could do little more than listen and commiserate, he later vented to his children in his weekly letter to them. “Everything in the scriptures suggests that both men and women are bound to Christ, that they consecrate their lives to Him and His purposes. It is the Lord’s plan to exalt each of us—men and women, the married and the unmarried, the educated and the uneducated. Any attempt to degrade any individual must emanate from a source other than the Lord. It is the meaning of the Restoration to exalt all of God’s children. And surely that means men and women.”
• In no small part because of the Mormon offensive, even when the window for ratification was extended to 1982, the ERA never took effect. In retrospect, it is apparent that the “morality” of the ERA, in the eyes of church leaders, was linked to a fear that it would lead to general empowerment of women—including Mormon women.
• Sonia Johnson followed the LDS women into the state and counteracted their presence by appearing on television and radio and issuing press releases. “When LDS people have questioned her she has insisted that ERA is a political matter, not a religious matter, and that she has a right to disagree with the Church and its officials on this political matter, also that she has a right to actively campaign against it.”
• Now that she had been put on trial, Leonard asked rhetorically what the real issue of contention was. “Does she have the right to argue for ERA in Sunday School class, in testimony meeting, in firesides, in public meetings to which Latter-day Saints are invited? Does she have the right to conduct a public campaign against the Church’s position when the First Presidency declared that this is a moral and religious matter? That, it seems to me, is the basic question.” He was particularly agitated about the possibility of her being excommunicated when “she is quite vocal in saying that she supports the prophet in all matters which are religious—in all matters which involve revelation.”
• Although he did not know Johnson, he had spoken with some of her close friends, who “emphasize that she is not really speaking as herself in the extreme statements she has made but has gotten carried away by ‘the movement.’” He also had heard that her bishop had counseled her for eighteen months, emphasizing more her commitment to her family than her ERA position. “In other words, according to what I have been told, it was not so much her belief that the Church was wrong that induced the bishop to ‘take up a labor of love’ but more her abandonment of her family—her full commitment… . There are at least some friends of Sonia who believe that she sought martyrdom in the interest of the Cause.”
• While Leonard never gave up his advocacy for women, Sonia Johnson’s excommunication caused him to qualify it to his children. “It’s one thing to work for the cause of women, as I hope all of us of are doing; it’s another to exaggerate and stretch points and get so carried away that you bring disrespect upon the cause.”
• “I know that there were Church Education people who were really upset with Leonard, who probably had the ears of a General Authority. They felt that he wasn’t writing faithful history. The CES office back then was writing the lesson plans, and it was important for them to make sure that no negative thing was said. The students would come in with an article they had read of Leonard’s, and the teachers would contact the head office and say, ‘How do I answer this?’ That made them mad at Leonard and what was happening.”
• Although Packer’s explanation for the meeting was to tell Leonard “a story or two,” in retrospect it is clear that he was giving Leonard a warning. Writing things “just because they were true” was not a wise course to take.
• After his presentation, “we spent a little while at the end of the discussion talking about the responsibility of Church historians. To what extent are we obligated to tell all of the truth?” One person argued that, while it is permissible to acknowledge that church leaders “have human failings,” it is inappropriate to describe such failings.
• “If history is going to be an aspect of doctrine and missionary work, then our department should not exist.”
• “I said that we are coming out with dozens of new facts and interpretations in all that we write and will have thousands of them perhaps in the new 16-volume history. I said that it would be impossible for us to clear all of these changes in our history and that I did not think we could determine the truth of what had happened in history by having somebody like the Quorum of Twelve vote on it.” Then, he threw down the gauntlet: “You do not determine historical truth by counting noses.”
• “There is absolutely no question in my mind that the Mormon ceremony which came to be known as the Endowment, introduced by Joseph Smith to Mormon Masons initially, just a little over one month after he became a Mason, had an immediate inspiration from Masonry… . They are so similar, in fact, that one writer was led to refer to the Endowment as Celestial Masonry.”
• As the twentieth century dawned, the church formally proscribed Masonic affiliation for church members, and three decades later Anthony W. Ivins, a member of the First Presidency, published an entire book whose thesis was that the church “was not influenced by Masonry, either in its doctrines, organization, or the bringing forth of the Book of Mormon.”
• Joe Christensen, associate commissioner of the Church Educational System—and Durham’s superior—asked to speak with Leonard about Durham’s address. Saying that he had received a good deal of criticism regarding Durham’s speech, Christensen asked for Leonard’s appraisal of it. Leonard recorded in his diary, “I think he was trying to find out if we had read the talk in advance and approved it—I assured him we had not—and whether I thought it was sound historically. I told him we had serious reservations.”
• Several years later Leonard, responding to a question from a colleague regarding Durham’s speech, gave the following reply: We found it impossible to defend him very strongly because we could not defend what he said. It simply was incomplete and misleading. He was required by his superior to write a letter of apology to those attending MHA bearing his testimony that Joseph Smith was a prophet. He did write such a letter. All of us regarded it as unnecessary and rather silly. In fact, he bore his testimony at the MHA meeting in Nauvoo the very next morning and in my judgment that took care of it. Reed has never been an effective Church history researcher since that date.
• But the real essence of the letter was a theme to which Packer often returned: the ecclesiastical always trumps the scholarly. “I have come to believe that it is the tendency for most members of the Church who spend a great deal of time in academic research, to begin to judge the Church, its doctrine, organization, and history, by the principles of their own profession… . It is an easy thing for a man with extensive academic training to consider the Church with the principles he has been taught in his professional training as his measuring standard. In my mind it ought to be the other way around.” Put simplistically, Packer advocated that dogma would always trump data.
• Thus Packer’s later statement, “Some things that are true are not very useful,”36 makes sense if one’s viewpoint is to use history selectively as a means to an end.
• How can they possibly judge us on what is good history and what is bad history?
• He then correctly described the balancing act that the division personnel were attempting. On the one hand, “we are trained to publish for our professional colleagues—being honest, straightforward, fearless, analytical, raising questions,” while on the other hand, “we know that Church authorities and Church audience want and have a right to expect faith-promoting history. Drawing a balance between professional and faith-promoting goals is our toughest problem.”
• Robert Flanders, an RLDS historian whose 1965 book, Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi, was critically acclaimed among historians but panned by many within Flanders’s church because of its candid discussion of polygamy during the lifetime of Joseph Smith.
• Glen Leonard commented on the philosophy that drove the writing of the book, and on the popular reaction to it. “The Story’s perspective was, ‘Let’s give them the ground-up meat so they can digest it, and help them put it in a context that they can deal with it, so they don’t have to find it first somewhere where it has spikes in it, and they bite, and they get bloodied.’ That’s the way faithful Latter-day Saint historians write now. They tell it, and they tell it in ways that it is helpful to those who are dealing with it for the first time, so they can have reliable sources that they can turn to, that they can trust.”
• Haight then went to the heart of Benson’s issue with the book. “‘Joseph Fielding Smith has an approach in which the Lord is responsible for all the things that brought about the growth of the Church and the devil is responsible for all things that interfere with that growth. You don’t have that approach, do you?’ I said, ‘Well, when people experienced the influence of the Lord and said so, we have mentioned that and the devil as well. But there are a wide variety of things that bring about certain developments, economic, political, natural, and so on, and we bring those into the account.’” In a dramatic departure from Benson’s criticism, Haight replied, “I am glad you do… . I realize that some of our history is controversial, but we can’t avoid that nor do I think we can restrict our history to telling about things the Lord caused or the devil caused. We have to tell a straightforward story. I hope you will continue to do that.”
• Feeling powerless in the face of Benson’s attack on “real” history, he saw two options for his future. “Shall I retain the job (assuming they don’t release me) and try to write history which will be approved by Correlation. Or shall I resign and continue to write ‘real history.’ … I am not clear in my own mind as to the best course to pursue, but feel discouraged, sad, shook. It has been a tough few days for me since I do not dare mention all this to a soul.”
• Stapley then relayed the sentiment of some within the Twelve that “we should not put anything in any of our histories that reflects badly on the Church… . I 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. His reply was again, we must leave the bad things out of our history.”
• While the tone of the meeting was positive, thanks to the implicit support of Kimball, the church president concluded with cautionary advice to Leonard: “He thought we should be concerned more with writing for a church audience than for the scholars, the professors, the students, the outside world. I bore my testimony as to my belief that a person could write for both audiences successfully, and he and specifically President Tanner expressed agreement with this and suggested that I continue under this assumption.”
• “Elder Stapley said in fairly strong terms that our primary goal must be to write for members of the Church, especially young people.”31 Afterward, Hunter took Leonard aside and gave him an extraordinary assessment of the situation—extraordinary in that he freely acknowledged a deep division of opinion among the Quorum of the Twelve on matters of writing history, and was candid in criticizing the philosophy of historiography that Benson and others held: “Leonard, I want you to understand that while it is difficult for me to be at odds with certain of my brethren I am in complete agreement with your point of view and with your policies. I want you to know this so you will not feel you are alone in standing up against the views of some of the brethren. I agree completely that you must keep in mind the audience of professional historians and scholars. You are doing a great work there in influencing their treatment of the Church and its leaders. I also agree completely that you must give a balanced view of our history. In the law it is not only unethical and immoral to misstate a fact; it is equally unethical and immoral to leave out a pertinent fact. We must surely be honest in our own history and we have nothing to fear from being honest and candid and pointing out some of the weaknesses and problems of some of the brethren. We must do it if our treatment is to be believed. I think you also ought to know that there are other brethren who agree with this.”
• “After the meeting, Deseret Book [board members] were told privately that President Kimball had just completed reading the book [Story] for himself, that he liked the book very much, that he couldn’t understand those who objected to it, and that he thought it was a fine piece of work.”
• Benson’s stated determination to prevent a second printing. “President Kimball wept and declared that this was not a Christian way to treat somebody who had performed satisfactorily an assignment… . [He] told George that Elder Benson did not have the right to stop the reprinting of the book—did not have the authority.”
• Boyd Packer’s letter to the First Presidency concerning Dean Jessee’s Letters of Brigham Young to His Sons,
• Trying to downplay any conflict between scholars and General Authorities, Leonard “emphasized the continuity between present day historical activities and those practiced by Joseph Fielding Smith, former Church Historian. He did point out that whenever a new volume of Mormon history has appeared it has been criticized. He said Joseph Fielding Smith’s Essentials in Church History came under sharp criticism when it was first published, as did B. H. Roberts’ Comprehensive History of the Church. Arrington believes that faith can increase through a study of history. He believes that the trend is toward more openness. ‘The direction is set,’ he said.” Leonard emphasized that “he does not believe that to humanize Mormon history is to secularize it.”
• If there was any residual doubt as to the direction in which things were headed, it was laid to rest one month later when, prior to the Mormon History Association’s annual conference, Boyd Packer, now advisor to the History Department, addressed all department employees at length, among other things telling them, “We are required to tell the truth but we are not required to tell the whole truth.”
• In 1957 Leonard wrote to Roman Catholic scholar Thomas O’Dea about his recently published, landmark sociological study, The Mormons, and chided him gently for his failure to mention the exclusionary policy. “The one problem which seems to disturb many at this particular time, and which you did not mention, was the problem of the Negro and the priesthood… . [People] find this the biggest stumbling-block. Lowry Nelson, as you know, has published a criticism of the Church on this score. I am sure that you are aware of this problem, and I mention it only to emphasize that it is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for some of the ‘liberals’ in the Church.”
• Reflecting on the topic in his autobiography, he noted that “a special committee of the Twelve appointed by President McKay in 1954 to study the issue concluded that there was no sound scriptural basis for the policy but that the church membership was not prepared for its reversal… . Personally, I knew something about the apostolic study because I heard Adam S. Bennion, who was a member of the committee, refer to the work in an informal talk he made to the Mormon Seminar in Salt Lake City on May 13, 1954. McKay, Bennion said, had pled with the Lord without result and finally concluded the time was not yet ripe.”
• McMurrin’s letter described his 1954 meeting with President McKay, in which McKay informed him that the exclusion of blacks from the priesthood was a policy rather than a doctrine, and that it would be changed someday. He kept McKay’s confidence for fourteen years until, when McKay was ninety-four years old, McMurrin described the historic meeting in the letter to Llewelyn in order that the McKay family might have a record of it. Taggart’s manuscript came to the attention of the First Presidency only a month after Leonard volunteered to edit it, and from that point until shortly before McKay’s death in January 1970 it was the subject not only of internal debate, but also of political intrigue.18 McKay had never shared with his counselors or members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles his insight that the issue was policy rather than doctrine. Taggart’s manuscript prompted Brown to attempt to change the policy administratively. Alvin Dyer, a counselor in McKay’s First Presidency but not a member of the Twelve, and senior apostle Harold Lee blocked Brown’s move, and Lee’s inclusion in the First Presidency following McKay’s death gave him the power to release Brown from that body, the first time since the death of Brigham Young that a counselor in the First Presidency was not retained by the new church president.
• After Lester Bush completed medical school at the University of Virginia, he served an internship at LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City during 1968–1969. On the side, he researched the history of the church’s policy on black ordination, digging into places that others had carefully walked around or of which they were not aware. Continuing his research on a subsequent trip to Utah, he found in the papers of Apostle Adam S. Bennion, housed at BYU, a folder containing the work of the 1954 committee referenced in Leonard’s autobiography. Bush took his own documentary collection of several hundred pages, which included the Bennion material and his own research notes, on an overseas assignment in Cyprus, during which he gave a copy to Edwin (“Ted”) and Janath Cannon. Ted was then president of the Swiss Mission, which had an international mandate that included the island nation. Janath, without consulting Bush in advance, subsequently showed the compilation to Apostle Boyd K. Packer during his autumn 1972 tour of their mission. In November, she wrote with some excitement to Bush, “It was most fortunate that the opportunity presented itself to bring your manuscript on the Negro to the attention of Elder Boyd Packer, as he not only has the scholastic background to appreciate the value of such a compilation, but has served on a committee to consider the problem of the Negro in relation to Church policy.” Upon returning to Salt Lake City, Packer immediately took the matter to the First Presidency, and following that meeting he wrote to the Cannons, “asking if we would be willing to send our copy to him for their perusal.”
• The contents of the Bennion papers were problematic for church leaders who held that the exclusionary policy was doctrinal—that is, grounded in a purported nineteenth-century revelation—and therefore likely immutable. The fact that no documentary evidence of such a revelation had ever been found—nor even a second-hand claim of such a revelation—was in itself disturbing, since it led to the circular argument that such an important position could not have been taken without such a revelation.
• Bush used his compilation to write a manuscript that, for the first time, documented that the exclusionary policy originated with Brigham Young and that it had never had the imprimatur of revelation. At some point during the spring of 1973, as he later reconstructed the chronology, “I had sent Packer a draft of my paper on blacks and the priesthood, and he had responded that the Historical Department had been consulted and there were some problems”25—problems that he did not specify.
• Bush responded by sending a copy of the manuscript, which had already been accepted for publication in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, directly to Arrington and Bitton.
• What Anderson did not communicate to Leonard was that in Packer’s meetings with Bush, he tried repeatedly to dissuade him from publishing it without directly asking him to withdraw it. Bush countered by expressing his willingness to correct any inaccuracies, but Packer could not cite any. Packer was no doubt accustomed to having the expression of his preference interpreted as authoritative instruction, but the young doctor firmly resisted “anticipating counsel,” a phrase that Packer would later make famous. Interviewed in 2008, Bush recalled how that meeting ended: “He finally, grudgingly said that I actually knew more about it than they did. So they weren’t really going to be able to debate that with me. This was after he had tried for a day-and-a-half. But it was the sort of thing they just didn’t think should be put in the record.”
• I did ask Arrington why, for all their new professionalism, none of the heavyweight historians had undertaken a study of the Negro doctrine—so that amateurs like myself wouldn’t have to try to work things out on our own. He said that my ongoing experience with the Authorities—meaning right then—provided the answer to the question.”
• Leonard recorded his observations. “It would appear that the purpose of these additional interviews [with Packer] was to attempt to sell him [Bush] on the idea that there is absolutely no doubt among the Brethren on the ‘Negro Doctrine’ of the Church, and that any research and writing on this subject is superfluous, wasteful, and potentially harmful. They do not see historical research on this question as making it easier for the Church to solve the ‘Negro Problem’; the doctrine is solved and settled.”
• Two weeks after Bush’s letter to Leonard, Dialogue published the article.34 Leonard told Bush in February 197435 that it was “a relief (his [Leonard’s] word) that it was finally out in print where it could be discussed, and made an analogy to the relief felt when Mountain Meadows Massacre was published by Juanita Brooks.”
• Leonard’s immediate assessment of the new church president was not unusual: “I was told this afternoon that President Kimball was a traditionalist, very conservative as to doctrine and as to procedures. A prediction was made that he would most likely choose Elders [Ezra Taft] Benson and [Mark] Petersen, as the senior members of the Quorum after him, to be his counselors. He has great compassion for ordinary persons and their problems, but his approach is that of a traditionalist rather than an innovator.”37 The assessment was wrong on all counts. Kimball retained Eldon Tanner and Marion Romney, Lee’s counselors; and although he had been a traditionalist, he turned out to be the most progressive church president of the twentieth century. His innovations reached into many realms of Mormon life, but his most significant was to abolish the policy on ordination of blacks.
  • Similar to assessments of Russell M. Nelson; assuming he’s old, traditional, and wouldn’t do much. But was quite wrong
• The day after Kimball’s first press conference, Leonard noted Kimball’s response to one of the questions asked by a reporter: Will there be any change in the policy on blacks and priesthood, now or in the future? “President Kimball said that this is a matter which depends upon the Lord. We ourselves have not said this policy. We are subject to the revelations of the Lord and if the Lord should dictate a change in this then it will occur.”
• Interviewed in 1995, Fyans recalled a visit from Kimball, then a senior apostle, to Montevideo in about 1962. They met in “a little chapel, with a little balcony in it. We were holding meetings, and for some reason he and I happened to be up in the balcony, just the two of us. I don’t remember the circumstances, but there were just the two of us there, and the chapel was empty. He said, ‘Tom, some way we’ve got to solve this problem of “the blood.” They are worthy people.’”
• One topic that came up in their conversations was the Jimmy Carter Administration. Carter had visited Salt Lake City, he and Kimball rode together in a parade, and despite being politically conservative, Kimball liked the president on a personal level. He remarked to the Carlsons that he couldn’t understand why Mormons had been shut out of the Carter Administration, and why the administration was “being so nasty to the Mormons.” Jack, whose manner was always direct, cut to the chase immediately: “Don’t you get it? It’s the black issue and the women’s issue. We’re the only people now who are standing so rigid on those issues, and until you change some of those policies, we are going to be excluded.” Kimball responded, “Well, what do you think would happen if we changed the policy? Give us a scenario.” Renee was in the meeting, “and we talked for maybe an hour. We just talked about what it would be like… . He was really serious about what the repercussions would be within the Church, what it would be within the Quorum of the Twelve, what he would have to do to get them to go along with it. He was very candid. There was no, ‘I think I need to go pray.’ It wasn’t that at all. It was a very rational, political issue that he would have to steer through his committee… . He asked all the right questions. For instance, he asked what we thought would happen with the southern parts of the Church.” The meeting occurred in the spring of 1978, just months before Kimball announced the revelation that changed the church. While it was apparent to the Carlsons that Kimball had not yet made a decision, it was also clear that he had given the matter serious consideration for some time, and that he had walked down that road far enough to discuss tactics. “He was still searching, but he was seeing the writing on the wall… . They talked about how it should be done. Jack’s advice was, ‘You should do it fast. Take advantage of the fact that you are the Prophet.’”
• On the day the revelation was announced, he added a notation in his diary of an episode that he had not recorded at the time it happened: Approximately six months ago Elder Neal Maxwell telephoned me on a confidential basis to ask if I could find for him the quote of Joseph Fielding Smith that “darkies are wonderful people.” He said he understood Joseph Fielding had said something more in that interview about blacks ultimately being given the Priesthood. My memory was that this was in an article in Time about 1966, or 1967. I hunted through Time and through other publications and could not find it. I gave up. Then about a month ago, quite by accident, I learned that it was in an article in Look in 1963.48 I hunted that article up, Xeroxed the article and sent it on to Elder Maxwell. He expressed his appreciation and asked for a Xerox of the Deseret News interview on which it was based. I sent that as well. He expressed appreciation for that as well. This suggests that Elder Maxwell, as chief planning officer, was actively working on a memorandum to President Kimball about the issue and wanted all the evidence he could find.
• My father was the kind of father who would always sit me down when I had a question. My father said, ‘The time will come when they will have full priesthood blessing and authority in the Church.’ I believed my dad.”
• “Then,” he said, “the mantle fell on me, and I wanted to know… . There were days when you brethren went home at night, and I had come over here night after night after night; and I have poured my heart out to the Lord to know why. Last week he answered me. He said, ‘The time has come.’ I called my counselors and told them and they said, ‘It is right.’ Then I said to my counselors, ‘We should notify the Twelve.’ They fully supported and sustained it, that the time had come.”
• The Seventy continued his narrative: “Then he [Kimball] leaned over and put his hand on Eldon Tanner’s knee, and he looked at him. I will never forget that look. He said, ‘Eldon, go tell the world,’ just like that.”
• “In talks to public groups, almost inevitably the question is asked ‘Why … ?’ My reply in such public discussions has been pretty much as follows: For the believing Mormon it is sufficient to know that the Lord’s servants—those empowered to interpret His will—have said the Lord has not sanctioned giving the Priesthood to blacks. As to why, we don’t know, nor do the Lord’s servants know. We accept it as one of the inexplicables.”53 His task now, as church historian, was to attempt to explain.
• In his published autobiography, Leonard described Kimball’s activism on the subject as having begun two years prior to the revelation. “In 1976, two years after he became president, Kimball began a systematic program of prayer, fasting, and supplication, asking the Lord to rescind the rule denying blacks the priesthood. Special emphasis was placed on this effort during the two-month period beginning in April 1978, when every day he put on his sacred clothes and went alone into the Holy Room of the temple for meditation, prayer, and supplication.”
• “President Kimball then offered a magnificent prayer that lasted about ten minutes—the words of the prayer were indeed the words of the Lord. Elder McConkie compared the feeling and experience that transpired to the day of Pentecost and the beautiful experience that transpired in the Kirtland Temple at its dedication. (Several of the Brethren of the early days of this dispensation were there.)”
• Joseph Fielding McConkie said that his father told him “that at one meeting—unclear whether it was all the Twelve or just the First Presidency—that someone commented, ‘The former presidents of the Church are here,’ and President Kimball confirmed it. On a second occasion, one of the men said, ‘President So-and-So is here,’ and President Kimball again confirmed that impression.”
• “At the end of that prayer, a Pentecostal experience occurred. All thirteen experienced and saw ‘just the way it was at Kirtland.’” Intrigued, McConkie’s family asked him several questions for clarification of the Pentecostal experience, and each time he gave the same answer. “The rushing of a great wind? ‘Just like Kirtland.’ Angelic choirs? ‘Just like Kirtland.’ Cloven tongues of fire?61 ‘Just like Kirtland.’ Visitors from across the veil? ‘Just like Kirtland,’” although he declined, despite several entreaties from his family, to identify who came “from across the veil.”
• The other was that, in a variation of the story McConkie had told his children, all of the Twelve worked through the week following the June 1 meeting to draft the text of the announcement. “All of them had a hand in it. All of them had the opportunity to consider individually and collectively each word and each phrase so that the statement itself is not presumed to be dictated by the Lord but worked out by the Brethren to convey the answer which the Lord had revealed to them.”
• A decade thereafter, Leonard added the final detail to his database after speaking with the daughter of LeGrand Richards, an apostle who had been present at the temple meeting on June 1, 1978, and who died in 1983. Leonard recorded: She told me that her father had told her about the revelation which permitted black men to hold the Priesthood. He told her that President Kimball had suggested, at the conclusion of the meeting of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve in the Temple, that he wanted them to join him in prayer. He prayed fervently, then an electric moment when he switched gears, so to speak. As if struck by a special vision he thanked the Lord for the revelation which made this addition possible. At that very moment, Elder Richards told his daughter, he, Elder Richards, felt a presence in the room and opened his eyes and looked up and saw Wilford Woodruff looking at President Kimball and smiling. Elder Richards said it was not his imagination; it was, in fact, President Woodruff, who was easy to recognize. He, Elder Richards, was 12 years old when President Woodruff died, and he had seen President Woodruff several times as a boy, so he knew very well what he looked like. Elder Richards said that he suddenly realized why Elder Woodruff was there. He also (WW) had faced a problem of similar urgency (the abolition of polygamy) when he was President. And he was now there to reassure President Kimball and the Apostles that they were doing the right thing in granting the Priesthood to worthy blacks. LeGrand’s daughter said this was not rumor, not hearsay, but she heard this from her own father, who told it to his family in a serious moment. So she knew it was an actual happening.
• Leonard chose to be restrained, writing a very condensed version of these events in his autobiography and prefacing it with a disclaimer even while he made his own desire for fuller disclosure part of his private record: Although members of the Twelve and the First Presidency with whom I sought interviews felt they should not elaborate on what happened, I learned details from family members and friends to whom they had made comments. Some of these statements may have involved colorful, symbolic language that was taken literally. It is a common regret among Latter-day Saints that general authorities do not speak openly about their remarkable spiritual experiences in the way Joseph Smith and other early prophets used to do. Although they unquestionably do have such experiences, they have said little about this one. Such a sacred experience that affected us all calls for a sober recitation. Here was indisputable evidence of God’s presence and direction in these latter days—divine reaffirmation of the faith and values of our church. The telling of the event expresses the profound wonder and enthusiasm that continues to grip Latter-day Saints in general and historians in particular.
• Knopf required extensive revision of the manuscript, particularly the last chapters that were seen to be “too pro-Church.” That created a dilemma for the authors. “The church people think we’ve leaned over backwards to accommodate the Gentile point of view; and Knopf thinks we’ve leaned forwards to accommodate the Church point of view,” Leonard commented wryly to his children. “So we’re clearly doing the impossible. Impossible to satisfy both groups. And whatever we do, both will be dissatisfied.”
  • The ideal scenario of nuance and compromise
• Durham’s praise for The Mormon Experience was sincere and durable. Over a year after its publication, he passed along to Leonard the comment of a non-Mormon friend, Elmer Culp, to whom he had given a copy of the book. Culp’s last sentence contained an irony that the writer could not have appreciated: “Having read many other books about Mormonism—both pro and con—it is a relief to find one that is both scholarly and objective in its treatment of the subject. The Mormon Experience surely meets the need for that kind of writing. Incidentally, the fact that the church condoned its publication shows how much progress your people have made in facing up to the real world of the present and its historical underpinnings.”10 By the time Culp wrote his letter, the History Division whose work he had praised was being dismantled.
• Nonetheless, Leonard considered possibilities in the event that the project was canceled. One was to create a private publishing firm and publish the books himself—an audacious thought that was totally at odds with his essentially nonexistent business skills, but that reflected the depth of his commitment to the project. “This experience helps to remind me that I still have an important responsibility in staying on this job until the sesquicentennial volumes are finally published. I can’t quit on the job until that is done—at least until those which are submitted by 1980 are published.”
• By mid-1979 four of the sixteen projected manuscripts had been completed, representing four periods of Mormon history: New York (Richard Bushman), Ohio (Milton Backman), the transitional period spanning the turn of the twentieth century (Thomas Alexander), and twentieth-century developments (Richard Cowan).
• The following week, Lowell Durham finally gave Leonard some insight into the impasse within the Quorum of the Twelve that had resulted in such mixed messages. “Lowell says that the Brethren of the Twelve have to meet side by side with each other for 50 or 60 years, and so they don’t want to make one angry; they go out of their way not to ruffle or irritate one of them… . Lowell also said he felt that his Uncle Homer had been more frustrated over the sesquicentennial controversy than any other.”
• The first genre of manuscripts to be restricted was presidential papers. In January 1979, Scott Kenney, one of Leonard’s staff who was working on a biography of church president Joseph F. Smith, wrote in his journal, “Church Archivist Don Schmidt informs me that a month ago a new policy was established prohibiting photocopying any presidency papers without special permission.” 44 Kenney, seeing the handwriting on the wall, worked feverishly in an attempt to complete his research while he still had access. “My main concern is will I be able to get everything I need out before restrictions are tightened? Will [Ezra Taft] Benson be content with this victory, or will he be able to implement even tighter measures?”45 His redoubled efforts notwithstanding, he was never able to complete the biography, and a professional-quality biography of this important president remains to be written.
• For the group of PhD historians, the dilution of mission was beyond the pale. One staff member commented to another, “It is clear that our purpose is to promote faith ONLY. Everything else is out. Just look for anecdotes.”
• Leonard emphasized to Hinckley that titles were not important to him. His concern was a practical one. “I still receive invitations to speak in Sacrament meeting and firesides almost every Sunday, and to study groups, civic clubs, and Sons of Pioneer and other organizations two or three times a week. I continue to receive a substantial body of mail and telephone calls from mission presidents, regional representatives, stake presidents, and others asking me to clarify issues of Church history that bother members and missionaries.” In the absence of someone else in the History Division who could respond to the invitations and queries, he had continued to do so—“some of the letters contain earnest pleas for help because, as they say, they have written to other Church officials who have not been able to give them satisfying answers”—but he saw a need for clarification from Hinckley. He concluded by writing, “I am glad to do all of this if you wish me to do so, regardless of title.”
  • We have a heritage of deep question asking that started with a seminal question: “which of all these churches is true?” Should we not honor the history of question askers by pursuing dogmatically as satisfying a truth as we can acquire, leaving only mysteries to God?
• “My own feeling is that the biggest error in judgment was our decision to write history instead of propaganda.”
• Perhaps most painful of all to read, and likely most painful for Leonard to write, was an admission that others who had not shared his optimism had been right. “One aspect that will be personally galling to me will be the gibes of my non-Mormon and anti-Mormon friends: ‘I told you so.’ Some scholars, Mormon and non-Mormons alike, have contended that skeptical and critical methods of historical research and writing are incompatible with the maintenance of a firm testimony of the Gospel. I have felt confident that they were wrong, and I have said so publicly many times—in professional papers, talks, books, and private conversations.”
• “I have contended that a Mormon can examine the truth of these and other facts connected with Mormon history with the same detachment and objectivity he would manifest toward other phenomena. If his faith is strong enough—and my own faith is certainly strong enough—he will take it for granted that, whatever the outcome of his research, he is not digging the grave of his own Church but, in the long run, is bolstering its structure by uncovering the truth.”
• Then, he extolled the virtues of a religious tradition that “has presupposed itself to be a progressive revelation of truth. Far from being inhibited by his loyalty to the Church from pursuing historical truth, the Mormon historian is committed to the discovery and unveiling of truth. He ought to be freer than the non-Mormon or doubting Mormon, who are already committed to a rejection of the Gospel, or at least to many of its claims.”
• And third, he had depended on Elder Durham to arrange what was best for them, rather than taking Eldon Tanner up on his initial offer of an open door. “I should have been more pushy… . I should have insisted on some means of educating the First Presidency and Council of the Twelve about our Church history. I should have written them a regular newsletter or some other device of keeping them up-to-date on our work and our findings. I was too preoccupied with keeping the profession behind me.”
• Significantly, the commitment of Leonard Arrington and the New Mormon Historians to “tell the truth” about Mormon history exacerbated the fears of General Authorities who were only one generation away from the protective strategy termed “lying for the Lord” (in B. Carmon Hardy’s memorable phrase),3 and who were, in general, so ill-informed about the facts of Mormon history that they were genuinely alarmed at the possible damage of “telling the truth.” For church leaders with this attitude, faithful and believing historians could—and frequently did—fall into the same category as those Leonard saw as trying to embarrass the church.
• Jerald began to dig deeply, seeking out early imprints on Mormonism that were almost inaccessible, in addition to standard references such as History of the Church. “How many kids, at nineteen, are going to sit down and read the whole documentary history? I don’t know why, but he did. Then he got a set of the Journal of Discourses. So there was this drive to get to the bottom of the whole thing… . How do you put the pieces together? He kept feeling the Church was controlling the pieces of the puzzle, so that you wouldn’t come up with the right picture. He wanted to find the missing pieces that gave the full picture.”
• Although Leonard was not privy to the extent of document swapping in the Underground, he was keenly aware of its harmful effects on his History Division. Since he did not control access to the documents, his response to the information that they contained, as well as the often-slanted narrative histories that devolved from them, was to provide nuanced, contextualized narratives from the History Division. “The solution to the publication of one-sided views by the Tanners, it seems to me, is not to deny that their view has any basis,” which had been the standard approach by Joseph Fielding Smith and Mark E. Petersen.
• Leonard’s approach was predictably scholarly. The corrective to bad information was good information—“to show the whole picture, to provide context, to show that their view is misleading. The church’s history may not have been unblemished, but it has survived and flourished because its members understand that any ‘error’ is a minor brush stroke in a very large painting.”
• In 1973, Leonard attended a banquet and sat next to Wendell Ashton, chairman of Public Communications for the church, and his wife Belva, who served on the Relief Society general board. The two men discussed historical writing, and Leonard “talked frankly to Wendell about the problems we had in writing good biographies, regretting that we had not produced better ones. I said that I doubted we could do very much about it as long as family members and church officials were so sensitive about realistic treatments.” At that point, Belva broke into the conversation, saying that church employees should not even attempt to write biographies and histories—a harsh message for a Church Historian who was still in the honeymoon phase of his new career, brief though it was. Rather, she contended, such books should be written by independent persons “who could write honestly. She asked me if in writing history and biography we had to consider what the church leaders and members would think. I replied affirmatively. She countered that our work would always be compromised because we had to do this. She greatly preferred to rely on Juanita Brooks, a fiercely independent writer with acknowledged probity. She remarked that if she wanted to get a straightforward account of something, she would read Juanita’s publications instead of the church historian’s accounts.”
• One point that Leonard missed was the generation gap between himself and his two apostolic adversaries, Ezra Taft Benson and Mark Petersen. Petersen and Benson were contemporaries—Petersen was only sixteen months Benson’s junior—but both were two decades Leonard’s senior. They had grown up at a time when some of the original pioneers who arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 were still alive—and still telling their stories of persecution. Furthermore, Benson served an LDS mission in the British Isles in the early 1920s, a time when anti-Mormonism sold newspapers, books, and the new genre of silent movies (Trapped by the Mormons was released in 1922), packed lecture halls, and surrounded elders on the street with jeering hecklers. To the two apostles, religion was still an us-versus-them contest, a theological war—and in warfare one does not concede anything to the enemy. For them, history served but one purpose and that was to win the war, both by glorifying one’s own side and by demonizing the other. Leonard, by contrast, grew up outside the Great Basin, had no contact during his youth with the pioneers and their stories, and by not serving a proselytizing mission was never the object of persecution or even derision. David Whittaker, a historian and long-time archival administrator in BYU’s library, recalled asking Leonard if he had received any persecution during his formative years because of his Mormonism. “He said, ‘The only memory I have that would be negative would be this parade. In this parade was a flatbed trailer being pulled by some horses. There was straw on it, and wooden cages with chickens in them. Up front was a rooster, and along the side was written, “Mormon Patriarch and his Harem.”’ He said that was the only thing he remembered that, visibly in his community, could be seen as anti-Mormon.” Thinking about that, Whittaker put the puzzle together. “That’s why he writes the kind of history he does. His generation had come to move beyond the prior period. But the problem was that the General Authorities that Leonard had to work with were of the prior generation.”
• Richard Howard, Leonard’s counterpart in the RLDS Church, sympathized with Leonard’s plight, for he was dealing with the same dilemma. “He could see connections between culture and institution, culture and church, culture and person. I think probably some of that was what got some of the Brethren a little bit anxious. The minute you start humanizing your religious icons, your religious leaders, you start to show them with their human traits as well as their spiritual traits… . It’s a threat to people who feel like theirs is the One True Church… . He could make his people believable because they were human beings living in a culture. They weren’t just one-dimensional figures walking down some illuminated track, and beyond them was darkness. That’s just such a false image.”
• I can remember being somewhat in a related camp in those years, where my simplistic statement of it was, “If it was good enough for the Lord for it to happen this way, why do we choose to express it differently?” It’s that faith of a fundamental believer that says, “Why would God ask us to put it down differently than what He actually did?” Of course, that assumes that He did anything. But one misses the fact that it is an organization, with all of that dimension of self-preservation.
• David Whittaker put it most succinctly when he said, “Historians, by nature, are the enemies of memory.”42 And when that memory is tinged with the sacred, the historians will always fight an uphill battle with the ecclesiastics.
• The second was Lowell Bennion, who in 1962 had been punitively stripped of the directorship of the LDS Institute of Religion at the University of Utah because of his espousal of liberal causes and his continued resistance to Ernest L. Wilkinson, the heavy-handed president of Brigham Young University who was also Church Commissioner of Education during the closing years of the McKay presidency.
• With an impressive cadre of assistants doing most of the actual research, Leonard began writing on May 23, 1981, and completed the entire first draft in seven months. After having three colleagues read and critique the manuscript, he sent it to Knopf in February 1982, just one month before Grace’s death.
• With respect to the content of American Moses, a general critique was that Leonard had pulled too many punches. “He was just too nice a guy to get into real controversy,” commented Leo Lyman, whose hard-hitting doctoral dissertation about Utah’s quest for statehood did not stop short of disclosing church bribes to national newspapers in exchange for their support—or at least their silence. “It was not his nature. And everybody that knew and loved him knew that and accepted it. But most of us who do, don’t value that book as much as we would have a book that had not pulled punches.”24 Although Shipps conceded that “Arrington includes more than enough information to fill out a ‘warts and all’ portrait that clarifies Young’s position in Mormon and American history,”25 there was a feeling that he had overemphasized the positive while underemphasizing the negative. Assistant Church Historian James Allen said, “I think one of the criticisms of the Brigham Young biography may be that it doesn’t point out all the problems and all the negatives. He has some in there, but he was an admirer of Brigham Young, and because he was an admirer, that’s the kind of biography he wrote. But that was Leonard.”26 Leonard’s son Carl agreed, noting, “I think that my dad was basically quite conservative about people’s personal lives, their private lives, as he was circumspect about his own.”27 And indeed, Leonard himself had noted in his diary, as he began to write the biography, “I am of course finding many things about Brigham Young that would be better left unsaid.”
• Brigham Young was an enormously powerful and enormously complex man who presided over the LDS Church longer than any other leader in its history, and yet many readers bemoaned the lack of complexity portrayed by the biography. Shipps was one reviewer who chided Leonard for having missed the inner complexity: Something is missing from these pages. Where is the man more concerned with “making Saints” than with the comfort of his people, the leader who spoke in tongues and who remained a visionary long after the first flush of religious enthusiasm was past, the believer who exhibited Joseph Smith’s “seer-stone” in Salt Lake City in 1857 and consecrated it during the dedication of the St. George Temple in 1877? Leonard’s Brigham offers a reasonable, straightforward, less than authoritarian religious leader whose theology and religious life were, above all, rational. In short, here is a Latter-day Saint leader who would appeal to today’s Mormon liberals. As otherwise informative and valuable as is this work, in that area it presents a serious misreading of the life and times of the “Lion of the Lord.”
• Richard Bushman, whose personal struggle to write a biography of Joseph Smith extended throughout his professional career, said, simply, “It didn’t go anywhere.”42 Perhaps the overall shortcoming of the book was due to Leonard’s inability to address head-on an essential question that continues to confront the LDS Church today: How do you deal with flaws in a prophet? Neither Leonard then nor the church hierarchy today has fully answered that question.
• “Faith and History: The Snell Controversy” described the firing from the Church Educational System of Heber Snell, largely over his liberal interpretations of the Bible.
• “Mixed Messages on the Negro Doctrine: An Interview with Lester Bush” explored the unfinished business of dealing with over a century of erroneous explanations for the exclusionary policy.
• In February 1980, Ezra Taft Benson, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, responded to this perceived threat in a speech at a BYU devotional that some interpreted as setting the stage for his own course of action upon becoming church president and prophet, which occurred five years later.10 First, he defined unambiguously the priority of the prophet in dealing with any issues: The prophet will never lead the Church astray… . The prophet is not required to have any particular earthly training or credentials to speak on any subject or act on any matter at any time… . The prophet does not have to say ‘Thus saith the Lord’ to give us scripture… . The prophet tells us what we need to know, not always what we want to know… . The prophet is not limited by men’s reasoning… . The prophet can receive revelation on any matter—temporal or spiritual… . The prophet may be involved in civic matters.”11 Then, to make sure that there was no misunderstanding about the target of his remarks, he said, “The two groups who have the greatest difficulty in following the prophet are the proud who are learned and the proud who are rich.”
• Four months thereafter he spoke with George Boyd, a Church Educational System employee whose wife, Maurine, was Spencer Kimball’s sister: George also said that he had learned that President Kimball in particular and the First Presidency in general were very angry about Elder Benson’s talk at BYU in which he made the statement that every word spoken by the current prophet must be regarded as from the Lord. They called Elder Benson in and scolded him and caused him to apologize to the First Presidency for those remarks. President Kimball declared that when the Lord spoke to him, that was one thing, but that the Lord did not speak to him on every topic and therefore it was Spencer Kimball talking, not the Lord.12 Firm though Kimball was in chastising Benson, the rebuke remained private. As a result, Benson’s message, rather than Kimball’s, was the one that predominated among church members.
• “The Book of Mormon—A Literal Translation?”15 • “Scholarship and the Future of the Book of Mormon”16 • “The Orson Pratt–Brigham Young Controversies: Conflict within the Quorums, 1853 to 1868.”
• Mormon Answers to Skepticism: Why Joseph Smith Wrote The Book of Mormon, written by a non-Mormon, challenged in a nonpolemical manner the official narrative that the Book of Mormon is a literal translation of an ancient record.
• Thus Saith the Lord challenged the conventional understanding of the process of revelation as it has occurred within the LDS tradition.
• The Changing World of Mormonism, an updated version of Jerald and Sandra Tanner’s privately published Mormonism, Shadow or Reality?, for the first time facilitated national distribution of their foundational work exploring and exposing the weaknesses in traditional claims.
• In June, Apostle Bruce McConkie took up where Ezra Taft Benson had left off and, in a fourteen-stake fireside at BYU, responded to the cumulative scholarship by lashing out at the “Seven Deadly Heresies” that he saw in many of the controversial articles.
• “The Reconstruction of Mormon Doctrine: From Joseph Smith to Progressive Theology.”23 • “The Mormon Concept of Mother in Heaven.”24 • “The Fuhrer’s New Clothes: Helmuth Hübener and the Mormons in the Third Reich.”25 • “Personal Conscience and Priesthood Authority.”26 • “All that Glitters: Uncovering Fool’s Gold in Book of Mormon Archaeology.”27 • “A New Climate of Liberation: A Tribute to Fawn McKay Brodie, 1915–1981.”
• In the summer of 1981, this time using the annual Religious Educators’ Symposium at BYU (for Church Educational System administrators and teachers), Boyd Packer drew a deep line in the sand in “The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect.”30 Lavina Fielding Anderson, in an early draft history of Leonard’s years as church historian, called it “a dismaying anti-scholarly manifesto,” the strongest rebuke yet to the Mormon intellectuals.
• Packer used apocalyptic terminology to describe a “war with the adversary”—a thinly veiled shot at intellectuals whose research and writings went contrary to his own views: There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful… . In an effort to be objective, impartial, and scholarly, a writer or a teacher may unwittingly be giving equal time to the adversary… . There is much in the scriptures and in our Church literature to convince us that we are at war with the adversary. We are not obliged as a church, nor are we as members obliged, to accommodate the enemy in this battle… . I think you can see the point I am making. Those of you who are employed by the Church have a special responsibility to build faith, not destroy it. If you do not do that, but in fact accommodate the enemy, who is the destroyer of faith, you become in that sense a traitor to the cause you have made covenants to protect.
• While taking note of Packer’s speech, Leonard put an optimistic spin on it, in a subsequent letter to his children, that differed markedly from the alarmed reaction of others. “Without naming anybody in particular he says we have not built faith enough… . Frankly, it didn’t bother me and I do not think it will have any effect on us. We’re sailing right along doing what we’ve always done and what we expect to continue to do. Elder Packer’s admonitions, in my judgment, should not cause any alteration in our work. If they embarrass anybody, they embarrass him.”
• One of Leonard’s former coworkers, D. Michael Quinn, by this time a professor of history at BYU and director of its graduate program, reacted quite differently and, in an unprecedented move, went public with a direct response not only to Packer’s speech, but also to Ezra Taft Benson’s 1976 speeches, “God’s Hand in Our Nation’s History” and “The Gospel Teacher and His Message.” In a lecture to the BYU Student History Association on November 4, 1981, Quinn said, “Elder Packer has created an enemy that does not exist,”35 and then went on to rebut, point by point, the anti-intellectual allegations made by both apostles. He concluded by redefining the “enemy” to which Packer had referred: The central argument of enemies of the LDS church is historical, and if we seek to build the Kingdom of God by ignoring or denying problem areas of our past, we are leaving the Saints unprotected. As one who has received death threats from anti-Mormons because they perceive me as an enemy historian, it is discouraging to be regarded as subversive by those I sustain as prophets, seers, and revelators. Historians did not create problem areas of the Mormon past, but most of us cannot agree to conceal them, either. We are trying to respond to those problem areas of Mormon experience. Attacking the messenger does not alter the reality of the message.
• “The Word of Wisdom in Early Nineteenth-Century Perspective.”43 • “A Gift Given, A Gift Taken: Washing, Anointing, and Blessing the Sick Among Mormon Women.”44 • “Women and Ordination: Introduction to the Biblical Context.”45 • “Process Philosophy and Mormon Thought: Two Views on a Progressing God.”46 • “Religion and the Denial of History.”47 • “The Adam-God Doctrine.”48 • “A Further Inquiry into the Historicity of the Book of Mormon.”49 • “‘The Fulness of the Priesthood’: The Second Anointing in Latter-day Saint Theology and Practice.”50
• Perhaps emboldened by the silence from the hierarchy since Packer’s 1981 speech, the editors published a lengthy interview with Sterling McMurrin in January 1983 that proved to be their undoing—and likely was the catalyst for what followed shortly thereafter.51 McMurrin’s expressed doubts about Joseph Smith’s First Vision and the historicity of the Book of Mormon were the final straw. Shortly after the interview appeared in print, Paul Richards, BYU Public Communications director, informed the editor that the newspaper could no longer be sold at the campus bookstore or on campus newsstands. Its lifeline severed, it ceased publication on April 12, only days after the calm was shattered.
• A meeting in mid-May between Sunstone editor Peggy Fletcher and Gordon Hinckley of the First Presidency suggested that Petersen had acted on his own in conducting what was then being termed the “witch hunt,” for Hinckley said he had known nothing about it, and apparently he brought the interviews to an abrupt end.
• “The tensions on the tightrope at the Brigham Young University can be creative and fulfilling as Arrington suggests, if they are produced by the open clash of ideas in the academic market place where the antidote for poor reasoning is better reasoning, not suppression of ‘false’ ideas.”
• Only occasionally did he comment on higher-profile issues, such as Eugene England’s startling allegation during a Q&A following a paper presentation in the Sunstone Symposium of 1992 that a church committee kept track of intellectuals. “There’ve been articles in the paper on the First Presidency committee on strengthening the members of the church that keeps files on us intellectuals and occasionally asks stake presidents to call us in to check on our loyalty,” Leonard commented to his children. “I’m glad it’s out in the open. The church’s activity in this regard has been indefensible, and I hope this public outcry will cause them to be more circumspect in their intimidation of historians and other writers.”
• Herm Olson, an attorney in Logan, Utah, quickly sent a photocopy to Barry Fell, a professor of invertebrate zoology at Harvard University whose book America BC claimed that many pre-Columbian inscriptions in the Americas constituted proof of contact with Old World civilizations.5 Within weeks, Fell wrote to a colleague in Saudi Arabia, a copy of the letter subsequently being included in Leonard’s diary.6 Fell’s suggestion that part of the translation was the “apocryphal book of Nefi” raised historical chatter to a fever pitch, but the subsequent failure of scholars of ancient languages to verify any of Fell’s translations quickly quieted the chatter—for a year.
• After he studied what he assumed would be supportive evidence, including the 1834 book by E. D. Howe19 that contained the earliest affidavits from Mormonism’s detractors, Jerald said to his wife, “It’s a forgery!” Her response probably surprised him: “Jerald, you can’t just go around accusing someone of fraud.” He responded, “I know this is a fraud, because someone has read the Newel Knight article in BYU Studies, and has read E. D. Howe, and has come up with the Salamander Letter.”
• Finally, on January 7, 1987, Hofmann pled guilty to second-degree murder. As part of a plea bargain, he submitted to fourteen interviews between January 7 and May 27, 1987, in which he systematically confessed that all of the documents relating to Mormonism that had passed through his hands were his own forgeries.
• June 1985: Linda Newell and Val Avery were banned from speaking at any church gatherings because of their authorship of Mormon Enigma, a candid biography of Emma Smith.
• August 1985: Dallin Oaks, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles since the prior year, warned church members not to criticize church officials. “It does not matter that the criticism is true”—a message that he repeated publicly the following year.
• November 1987: David Wright, a BYU assistant professor, was terminated from the university because of his unorthodox views about biblical and LDS canon, despite never having voiced those views in the classroom.
• Late 1992: BYU’s board of trustees vetoed an invitation to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Mormon feminist and winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for History for A Midwife’s Tale, to speak at the 1993 BYU/Relief Society Women’s Conference. The board gave no explanation for its vote. Ulrich later won a MacArthur “genius” award and was appointed the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University in its History Department.
• Within nineteen days, the September Six—a name already being used by the media—had been subjected to harsh church discipline. The first to be tried, Lynne Kanavel Whitesides, received the lesser punishment of “disfellowshipment,” which restricted her privileges as a church member but did not eject her from the church. The remaining five—Lavina Fielding Anderson, Avraham Gileadi, Maxine Hanks, D. Michael Quinn, and Paul J. Toscano—were excommunicated.
• “Added by LJA”: “Let me here record that I was told by an ‘insider’ that Elder Packer, some time ago, had told Jon Huntsman, president of Monument Park Stake, that he must excommunicate a certain person. President Huntsman said he would not like to do it. They argued a little. Finally, insistent on having his way, Elder Packer told him, ‘Excommunicate that person or I will excommunicate you.’ President Huntsman held the trial and excommunicated him.”
• Although Leonard’s pain is evident through much of the book, he characteristically rose above it in the valedictory that comprised its final paragraphs: I have tried in this memoir to bear witness to the loyalty of my colleagues and associates to the Latter-day Saint ideals of professional competence, sincere truth-seeking, and unquestioned integrity, trustworthiness, and dedication. Our historical scholarship was accompanied by firm convictions of the truth of Mormonism. If we did not measure up, we can at least say that we sincerely tried. May Latter-day Saint historians lengthen their stride as they strive to develop capacities that will enable them to write histories worthy of the marvelous work and the wonder that is their heritage.
• The following day, Dr. Nelson performed sextuple bypass surgery on Leonard. As Leonard was convalescing in the hospital, Nelson came to see him. “Leonard, your operation has marked the end of an era. I have done thousands of these bypasses, some of them history making in themselves, but this is the last. And I am so pleased that I have been able to perform this historic operation on a historian!”
• In a special section on Mormonism published in the Christian Century during the 2012 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, prominent Mormon historian Richard Bushman, in an article entitled “Essential Books on Mormonism,” listed only eight books, one of which was Great Basin Kingdom.
• I think Chas Peterson’s essay in the Arrington Symposium is a good look at the strengths and weaknesses of Great Basin Kingdom. The bibliography of Great Basin Kingdom is a wonderful benchmark watershed of Mormon studies.
• Leonard’s other books were of very mixed quality, with the quality of the writing depending on the ghostwriter. Those that were written by him or had the greatest input from him—Adventures of a Church Historian, Brigham Young: American Moses, The Mormon Experience—have had staying power, but others have faded.
• William Russell, placed Leonard within the Pauline tradition of Christian love. “A true Christian loves people, and loves truth much more than he or she loves an institution. Leonard was that kind of person. I always felt unconditionally loved by Leonard.
• An example of the latter was described by Elbert Peck: “A decade earlier you had few people just writing and bonding together, Juanita Brooks and her friends, but there weren’t many. In the ’60s you had more people coming out. There is some correspondence between her and Dale Morgan where they are commiserating about their lonely plight as historians. But there was not this boostering sort of thing. I would say that was Leonard’s greatest contribution.”
• His philosophy was that you don’t hoard it to be the first one to write it; you share it to see that it gets done. You facilitate the creation of new work.”
• Elbert Peck recalled an incident from a history meeting. “I remember being there once with a very young Bryan Waterman. He was bright and had read everything about Mormon history almost by the time he left his mission. It was his first Mormon History Association meeting, and Leonard was just like George Washington for him. He stood up and tears were streaming from his eyes, and he was applauding enthusiastically, because Leonard was a living symbol for the history.”
• When historians belong to groups that sociologists call “cognitive minorities,” they have the opportunity to (a) kick over the traces and show anger to the place from which they come, (b) turn apologist, (c) equivocate on controversial points, or (d) do a public relations job, glib from start to finish. Leonard avoided all of these ways of being. These days few historians give much credence to the theme of “objectivity.” But there are many of us who think historians can be “fair-minded” and be “disinterested” where that matters. In respect to a religious group, this means: critical loyalty and loyal criticism. There was never any doubt but that Arrington loved the tradition that often inspired and too often frustrated him… . When a faith relies as much on story as the Mormon version does, there are more risks than when the origins of faith lie in mythical pasts. Arrington knew how to take risks and when to show love—and he showed love for the tradition!—and when to be restrained.
• Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard University expressed that kinship to him. “His commitment to knowledge, which I associate with my father as well—that’s the way I was raised, even though my dad was pretty right wing. Even my siblings, my brothers, are very conservative Republicans, but they are intellectually curious and they believe in knowledge. There is that strand of Mormonism that goes back to the beginning, and it is part of my heritage.”
• Leonard’s embrace of the truth—and of the necessity of telling the truth in publications—was an issue of personal integrity. Later, for others, it became an issue of necessity as the Internet became all-pervasive. There are no more secrets, and any attempt to gloss over inconvenient truths from our past is quickly exposed by those who have open access to the data. Richard Bushman, one of the most respected elder statesmen of Mormon history, told folklorist Bert Wilson, “The day has passed when we can keep things private and to ourselves. With the Internet, with the widespread availability of all kinds of information on different aspects of Mormon history, we can’t hide it any longer. It’s there. We either have to deal with it, or be made fools of.” Wilson agreed, and added, “[Leonard] was the one person more responsible than anybody else that started this New Mormon History approach, an objective rather than just a subjective approach. It was not a critical approach in that you try to denigrate or run down the Church, but it was not an apologetic approach, and so much of Mormon history before then had been an apologetic approach. He wanted to tell the story as it was, and in doing that, I think he created the whole discipline in Mormon historical research that we know today.”
• Emma Lou Thayne commented, “He wanted to inject into any kind of history the ‘why,’ not just the ‘what.’ That was a great gift, but the ‘why’ became suspect… . How often are we asked to consider something? We are told. To be asked to consider is the greatest kind of compliment. When were you ever asked to consider something in a church manual or a church setting? To me, that is the sort of thing that Leonard capitalized on, and why he was such a treasure to all of us.”
• When viewed in hindsight, the actions that church leaders took to dismantle the History Division appear overreactive and even draconian, particularly with the perspective of the Internet’s subsequent effect on historical candor. But when viewed in the context of American society during those years, their actions are actually reflective of the mainstream. Laurel Ulrich positioned Leonard’s contribution in the national context of the profession. “I guess the question has to be whether someone who is buoyant and optimistic and has such an abiding faith that ‘the truth and nothing but the truth is good enough for my church’ may not have seen that some people can’t handle complex historical arguments. It’s a kind of thinking, and not everybody has it. It’s not transparent: history is dangerous. I think it might be important to think of that.” What Leonard encountered as he attempted to present complex historical arguments to church leaders who couldn’t handle the news was similar to the reaction of larger American society to arguments they couldn’t handle, particularly those dealing with the Vietnam War. Ulrich continued, “Certainly in American history, the turmoil of the ’60s produced a dramatic transformation of the profession that continued into the ’70s and ’80s. The pushback from the right wing was immense. I think the Mormon story is probably a smaller manifestation of a larger national story about revisionist history.”
• “Even those who may still be there who had some question about it could see that this was inevitable, that we have to have a scholastically respectable history written,” observed Carol Madsen. “We can’t keep doing the eulogistic biographies and histories that we had before and expect anybody to take us seriously.”
• Ronald Esplin considered: It’s ironic in a sense, but one of the realities is that had Leonard not had the History Division, had not much of that survived at BYU, had not 25 years later a good part of it come back here,42 and had the [Larry] Miller family not come in with resources to allow us to triple that, we would probably never have had the resources to have the Publications Division they are building right now. So what they view as their destiny, their future of being the center for Mormon scholarship is absolutely built on what Leonard started. Without that seed that has survived, and then the additional resources that the Millers provided, it wouldn’t have happened.
• Elbert Peck recounted a moving scene that took place in Leonard’s home a short time before his death: A few weeks before he died, Jan Shipps and I went to visit him at his house. He was feeble but alert, and came out and talked to us for about an hour. But then he got tired, and had to go back to sleep. His autobiography had just come out. I had read it, and I said to him, “Leonard, everyone is looking for you to score all these points against the people who did you wrong, but you really downplayed that in your autobiography. The point you seem to be making again and again and again is the possibilities that Mormon history can contribute to the Kingdom.” His face really lit up and he said, “Yes! Yes! Yes! That’s the point I wanted to make, that it is a positive contribution!” I think that really was Leonard.
• James Clayton, sets the bar high: “I am not optimistic that there will be, in my lifetime or even soon thereafter, any real appreciation for what he did. But eventually, I think his name will go down in the church records as someone like Galileo, who made a point and took a position that was unpopular at the time, but eventually the church came around.”
• An interview of Lavina Fielding Anderson, published in the Salt Lake Tribune, underscored some of the relevant issues. “The matter has been cast as a question of control and possession. But that conceals a whole set of deeper questions… . Who owns a people’s history? What happens to a history-based faith if the primary message about its history is that it’s scary and dangerous and has to be so carefully controlled? Where’s the line between preserving documents and suppressing the information they contain?”