Review
Title: A Voice in the Wilderness: The 1888-1930 General Conference Sermons of Mormon Historian Andrew Jenson
Editors: Reid L Neilson & Scott Marianno
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Documentary History
Year Published: 2018
Number of Pages: 338
Binding: Cloth
ISBN: 978-0-19-086782-9
Price: $ 74.00
Reviewed by Andrew Hamilton for the Association for Mormon Letters
In the 21st century, a General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a fairly formulaic event. Five two-hour long meetings, all originating from the ultra-modern Conference Center in Salt Lake City, are held over the course of a single weekend twice a year. For those who cannot fit inside the 21,000-seat facility, the meetings are broadcast live to all of the buildings on Temple Square, to LDS meetinghouses around the world, and to the homes of any interested person via radio, TV, and the internet. The length and format of the meetings allow for approximately 35 sermons to be given each conference. About 20 of these (health depending) are always by members of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. This leaves roughly 15 sermons to be divided between the 100-plus members of the Seventy, the Presiding Bishopric, and the various auxiliary leaders. The majority of the one-hundred or so male and female leaders outside of the top 15 will likely speak once or twice at the most in a general conference during the tine that they serve in their “callings.”
One hundred years ago things were very different. As the 20th century opened, a General Conference lasted three days and at a minimum there were seven meetings held. Before broadcast technology was invented, there needed to be an option for the people who traveled great distances to hear a session of conference but who could not fit in the 6,000-7,000 seat Tabernacle. To meet this need, overflow sessions were held concurrent to the main tabernacle sessions in the Assembly Hall and even on the open grounds of Temple Square. This increased the need for speakers. Another major difference of the time? Compared to the over 100 general authorities and officers that the LDS Church has now, in 1900 there were twenty-six. This meant that many non-general authorities were called to fill speaking roles at the Super Bowl of Mormon meetings.
One of the men who for a time was called upon to fill this need for General Conference speakers was Andrew Jenson. Jenson’s name is not well known among Mormons today; even among those who specialize in Mormon studies his name and story may not be familiar. But there was a time when he was one of the most important men in preserving and sharing the history of the LDS Church. Jenson’s parents joined the Church in their native Denmark when he was four. In 1866 they came to the United States and settled in the Salt Lake Valley. Starting in 1877, when Jenson was twenty-seven, he began producing church-related periodicals. In 1886 Jenson started working part time for LDS Church history department. In this position he frequently toured the Church collecting records from its wards and members and encouraging the creation of new records. These trips seem to have led to some amusing experiences for Jenson. In his October 1926 general conference sermon, he alluded to a sense of frustration felt by both himself and by the locals when he conducted his visits. Describing these visits Jenson said:
“Sometimes, when I visit some of the stakes of Zion in the interest of history, I am looked upon as a sort of Rip Van Winkle, or some ancient of days, who has been asleep for twenty years, or more, and it seems as if some people are actually annoyed by it” (p. 191).
I enjoyed reading this and learning that some things never change, including that local Latter-day Saints sometimes get frustrated by the demands placed upon them by visiting Church authorities.
In 1897 Jenson’s part time gig transitioned into full-time work and he was designated a full-time assistant Church historian. In this position he was involved in the creation of the “Journal History of the Church” and wrote and compiled the four volume “Latter-day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia.” Starting in 1888 and continuing through 1930 one of Jenson’s occasional duties, as detailed in this volume, was to speak in General Conference. He was eventually given this responsibility twenty-eight times between the years 1888 and 1930.
I’ll be completely honest: even though I had heard of Jenson before I read this volume and knew of his work and his significance, if someone had approached me and said, “Did you know that Andrew Jenson spoke 28 times in general conference? Say, here’s a real boffo idea, let’s compile them all into a book and get it published!” I would have laughed and assumed that they were trying to have a good joke with me. Now, having read the book, I am very glad that Reid Neilson and Scott Marianno performed the arduous task of creating this awesome volume.
Having read many documentary histories in recent years, I have come to love and rely on great introductions and solid footnotes, especially when reading records that I am less familiar with. Quite often when studying these documentary books, I spend as much time going through the introductions and footnotes as I do the documents. Having read many such introductions and a multitude of footnotes, I feel that the contextualization resources prepared by Neilson and Marianno rank at the top. They have done an excellent job of giving their readers an introduction to and understanding of Andrew Jenson and his world.
The introduction to “A Voice in the Wilderness” begins by describing the pageantry that occurred in 1930 when The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints celebrated its 100th anniversary. This also happened to be the last time that Jenson was called upon to speak in General Conference. They use this occasion to frame Jenson’s life work by writing:
“The public memorial was quite similar in function to Jenson’s oral accounts of Church history during his twenty-eight general conference sermons. Both attempted to condense and refine for faithful church members a celebratory narrative that granted them a proud doctrinal and historical heritage” (p. 3).
From there they describe Jenson’s common themes, they explain and detail Jenson’s responsibilities as an assistant church historian, including his many travels and record collecting trips, and they give a detailed biographical sketch of Jenson’s life. I was mildly disappointed by one thing in this section. One of Jenson’s major responsibilities during his time as an assistant Church historian, especially in the 1890’s, was visiting the various LDS settlements and collecting important Church history records. Neilson and Marianno give a fair amount of attention to these trips in the introduction and they even mention them in the footnotes. But they never mention one of Jenson’s most important record gathering trips – his 1892 trip to Southern Utah to record and collect people’s memories and accounts of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I realize this trip was the subject of its own book[1] but it still seems important enough to me for at least a passing mention. One really interesting fact mentioned in this section was that during Jenson’s trips throughout the Mormon settlements in the 1880’s and 90’s he gave over 5,700 addresses to the local Mormon communities (see pp. 11-12). This section also explains the importance of General Conference for Latter-day Saints and its place in establishing history, doctrine, and revelation in the church.
Neilson and Marianno use the majority of the introduction to go into detail about Jenson and his sermons. Among the themes they explore are: his record keeping, his doctrine and theology, his preservation of history and chronology, and how his work and sermons related to “the Coming Global Church.” I found this portion of the book to be fascinating. Neilson and Marianno did an excellent job of explaining Jenson’s beliefs and the themes that he spoke on. Researchers interested in learning more about this transitional time period in Mormon history would do well to read carefully this part of the introduction and then study related sermons by Jenson.
Jenson’s sermons in “A Voice in the Wilderness” and the accompanying notes from Neilson and Marianno provide an excellent look at transitional Mormonism in the late 19th and early 20th century. As an employee of the historian’s office who was focused on the preservation of records and the creation of the LDS archives, Jenson’s sermons often focused on the events and stories of early LDS history and the importance of creating and preserving records of these events, but he also spoke on other important and interesting themes. Two themes that come up frequently and could form the basis of some interesting studies of this time period in LDS history are “the gathering” and “Anglo-Saxonist nationalism” (see pp. 30-32). Sermons seven, eight and ten are among those with “the gathering” as their theme. In these sermons Jenson presents an interesting mix of stories and quotations that weave LDS history with the Old Testament and provide one of the best examples I have read of tying Mormonism and its history to the biblical narrative. Jenson saw the actions and migrations of the early Mormons as not only a fulfillment of biblical prophecies but also as a reliving of the Bible narrative.
You might expect that a historian who tells stories of “gathering to Zion” would frequently mention themes of genealogy and where the early Mormons come from. Jenson does do this, but I was not expecting this to also be a focus on the importance of Anglo-Saxons to the church. In sermon number ten, which Jenson gave in April of 1913, after speaking of the Bible and his visit to Palestine, he transitions into speaking about the Mayflower and early US history. He then spends pretty much the rest of the sermon (six paragraphs on three pages of the text) speaking on the importance of the Germans, the Swedes, the Norwegians, and the Danes in LDS history. He speaks about their myths, their beliefs in early Christianity and even references Freemasonry, King Solomon, and the lost tribes of Israel and then he ties this all into the success of the Mormon missionaries among these people (see pages 118-125). Jenson’s focus on “Anglo Saxons” became larger and more direct in the 1920’s. Here is a selection of quotes:
“Ever since that great Anglo-Saxon Prophet [Joseph Smith] began to receive glorious visions, converse with angels, and obtain the gifts of translation…” (p. 220).
“We are just a little pleased to know that Winter Quarters was the first Anglo-Saxon settlement in what is now the state of Nebraska” (p. 238).
“We are just a little proud to think that these same Latter-day Saints, about 320 strong, almost immediately after their arrival in California changed a little, insignificant Spanish village, called Yerba Buena, into an Anglo-Saxon town…” (p. 239).
“They established Fort Hope, the first Anglo-Saxon settlement in that beautiful valley of California…” (p. 340).
“God indeed has spoken from heaven in these last days and has raised up a great Anglo-Saxon prophet to restore the true gospel of Jesus Christ to the Earth once more…” (p. 240-241).
“They found there only a small Spanish village, called Yerba Buena, which the Brooklyn people soon turned into a thrifty town called San Francisco, and made it not only an ordinary Anglo-Saxon town, but with a Mormon majority (p. 271, I’m very curious to know why he thought the Anglo-Mormons were more “thrifty” than the Spanish).
He also mentions that the Mormon Battalion were the first Anglo-Saxons in Colorado, mentions Winter Quarters being the first Anglo-Saxon settlement in Nebraska again, and says that Mormons were the first Anglo Saxons in Idaho (see pp. 272-273). Obviously, these ideas have a lot to do with Jenson’s ideas about the Mormons being modern descendants of Israel. I’m assuming there is some of what is called “British Israelism” influencing Jenson. In the introductions and notes Neilson and Marianno do offer some very helpful analysis of these ideas. But I think that these sermons present an interesting worldview and could form the basis of a study that could help modern students of Mormon studies better understand Mormon views of race, gathering, and other ideas as well.
I only have one complaint about this book – the price is on the steep side. I’ll be honest, I have no idea how much it costs to produce and market any book and especially a book like this one. I can only imagine that it is a costly endeavor. I realize that books for Latter-day Saints constitute a niche market, that books for Mormon studies audiences are a niche market within a niche market and that, like the tiniest Matryoshka doll in the set, Mormon documentary history is a nice market within a niche market within a niche market. I would assume that this means that the publisher had to take into consideration that not many people would be likely to purchase this book and adjust the price up accordingly. I imagine that a lot of considerations came into pricing this book. But the reality is that, at $74.00, only the most serious collectors and researchers are likely going to be investing in “A Voice in the Wilderness.” This is a shame because Neilson and Mariano have done a fine job in editing and writing for this volume and I feel that their work deserves a wider audience than the price of the book will afford them.
In the editor’s preface Neilson and Marianno write that with this volume they:
“Intend(ed) to highlight Jenson’s unwavering voice on behalf of the institutional history of the church, but we also make a broader appeal for the study of historical discourse and its effect on institutional memory.” They then challenge scholars within and without of Mormonism to use this collection and their analysis as a “launching point for future studies that engage with lay and ecclesiastical discourse in official settings” (p. xiii).
Having studied these 28 talks and Nielson and Marianno’s notes and analysis, I believe that they succeeded in their goal. “A Voice in the Wilderness” is a wonderful time capsule that presents an important viewpoint from the “Mormonism in transition” phase of LDS history. Jenson’s sermons from this time and his position as something of an “outsider insider” give a glimpse into Mormon historical preservation efforts and doctrinal development that will never be seen again. As I just alluded to in reference to early LDS thoughts on race and the importance of Anglo-Saxons in modern Israel, I hope that there are researchers and historians, and even a few lay people, who will take Neilson and Marianno up on their challenge and write a scholarly article or put together a symposium based at lease in part on these sermons.
I’m not the guy to take up that challenge, but I will end with this. Andrew Jenson used to be the guy who I had to thank for starting the LDS “Journal History” that I used many times over the years and who wrote some thick, old books that for the most part sit on my shelf looking important and collecting dust. Now that I have read “A Voice in the Wilderness.” Andrew Jenson is a guy that I would really like to meet, someone that I would like to quaff a few root beers with while he regales me with stories of his travels and his efforts to create the early LDS archives and preserve the history if the institution to which he dedicated his life. Neilson and Marianno have shown that Jenson was a fascinating man with big ideas and hopes and I would encourage people to take advantage of their efforts and explore late 19th and early 20th century Mormonism through the eyes and words of Andrew Jenson in “A Voice in the Wilderness”.
[1] “Mountain Meadows Massacre: The Andrew Jenson and David H. Morris Collections”, Ed. By Richard Turley and Ronald Walker, published jointly by the Brigham Young University and University of Utah Press’s, 2009