Alder, ed., “Honoring Juanita Brooks: A Compilation of 30 Annual, Presentations from the Juanita Brooks Lecture Series, Dixie State University” (reviewed by Cheryl Bruno)

Review
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Title: Honoring Juanita Brooks: A Compilation of 30 Annual Presentations from the Juanita Brooks Lecture Series, Dixie State University
Editor: Douglas D. Alder
Publisher: Dixie State University
Genre: Mormon Studies
Year Published: 2014
Number of Pages: 853
Binding: Softcover
ISBN13 978-0-915630-57-8
Price $18.75

Reviewed by Cheryl Bruno for the Association for Mormon Letters

*Honoring Juanita Brooks* is a festschrift of 30 yearly historical lectures given in her honor at Dixie State University between 1984 and 2014. Each comprises from 10 to 30 pages which can be read and savored individually in quiet moments or while waiting for a doctor’s appointment.

The introduction and biography provide an overview of Brooks’ life, detailing how a woman born in 1898 in the obscure Utah town of Bunkerville could have become such a pivotal figure. The editor, Douglas Alder, draws upon stories from her life which show both her access to Mormon history and reasons for her keen interest. One such tale describes Brooks’ acquaintance with the aged patriarch, Nephi Johnson, who had pronounced her Patriarchal Blessing. When she was teaching grade school in Mesquite, he approached her with a request to help him write something. Unaware that Johnson wanted assistance in relating his participation in the Mountain Meadows massacre, she put off the meeting. Months later, she was urgently called to his bedside in the moments before his death. In a confused state, he unsuccessfully attempted a final confession, shouting, “Blood, blood!” It was a moment she would never forget.

Lecture 6 is written by Levi Peterson, Brooks’ biographer. The lecture series was begun before her death, and at the time of this speech, she was in a nursing home, in a semi-comatose condition. Peterson lovingly stated that the fact of her incapacitation made the occasion of his lecture “more solemn and sacred.” “If there is any single spot that marks the heart of Utah’s Dixie, it is this very pulpit, and, if there is any single person who epitomizes the civilization of that arid, eroded domain, it is Juanita.” Peterson believes that without the Mountain Meadows story, Brooks “would have remained a local antiquarian or, at best, a minor historian. Her inquiry into this episode of Utah history took fifteen years. In the end, Brooks wrote three major works to cover the story: *The Mountain Meadows Massacre* (1950), *A Mormon Chronicle: The Diaries of John D. Lee* (1955), and *John Doyle Lee: Zealot, Pioneer Builder, Scapegoat.* In turn, she “made the saga famous.”

Readers and admirers of Juanita Brooks will find this lecture fascinating for its behind-the-scenes details of the publication of her histories. This includes Apostle Delbert Stapley’s effort to dissuade Brooks from including news of John D. Lee’s posthumous reinstatement into the Church in the first printing of her biography: “IT IS FROM THE DEVIL.” Peterson also writes of his discovery that Brooks fibbed about her withdrawal from a movie project, completely fabricating “a scenario writer and an outline and, later, a trip to a country estate near Las Vegas and a manuscript.” Despite this, he finds her vices trifling and pardonable, and her reputation for historical integrity well-deserved.

Especially interesting to Brooks aficionados are lectures 18, 25, and 30 in this book, which provide updated coverage of the blood bath at Mountain Meadows. Robert H. Briggs provides an overview of the massacre and a history of the three waves of investigation of the incident. Forty-three key reliable admissions by participants form the bedrock of our understanding of the massacre, and are utilized by Briggs to construct a “consensus account and timeline.” Speaking in 2009, Glen M. Leonard revisits the massacre, praising Juanita Brooks for her objective and dispassionate work. Leonard describes a collaborative effort he participated in with Ronald W. Walker and Richard E. Turley. He provides a fascinating look at the problems in many of the old sources as well as new discoveries and controversial conclusions.

Many of the lectures were inspired by Juanita Brooks, her writings, or issues from Southern Utah history. In a piece entitled “Juanita Brooks and Family Narratives” William A. Wilson pointed out that “Brooks’s love of her country, Dixie, and her attempts to preserve and tell its stories have taught me to cherish my own antecedents and to collect and interpret the stories of my Idaho home and family.” Wilson’s goal in speaking was to impart inspiration from Juanita’s efforts and his own experiences to encourage others to “begin more seriously to value your heritages, resolving to record, study, and make available the stories from your own backgrounds—family and community stories that could, and should, enrich all our lives.”

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s lecture lauded Juanita Brooks’s influence on her writing as well. When she and a group of Boston Latter-day Saint women agreed to edit a “women’s issue” of Dialogue journal, they solicited an essay from Brooks. Ulrich speaks of her delight when she received “I Married a Family.” As a young Mormon mother struggling to inaugurate an intellectual life, “it was a great comfort to know that a renowned historian had once hidden her typewriter under the ironing.” In honor of this essay, Ulrich spoke on the history of housework, and the way that she was able to make this seemingly trivial activity a vital and interesting part of her story of Martha Ballard’s journal in the award-winning “A Midwife’s Tale.”

Southern Utah polygamy is represented in lectures by Larry Logue and Ken Driggs. Logue’s piece is an overview of the subject. He notes that many studies of Mormon polygamy accord with “the church’s twentieth-century efforts to minimize Latter-day Saints’ differences from mainstream American society.” However, he declares that “changes in historical scholarship have placed new obligations on historians of polygamy.” Logue urges “community studies” and utilizing evidence of ordinary life, especially in the particularly appropriate setting of St. George. Logue includes statistical information about aspects of polygamy in St. George which illuminates percentage of polygamists in the community, ages of participants, living arrangements, childbearing and family size, and Mormonism’s post-polygamy transition. The most innovative part of this lecture was Logue’s description of polygamy as ritual.

Driggs, an expert on legal aspects of modern Fundamentalism, focuses on the movement’s twentieth-century historical roots. At an introductory level, he acquaints the reader with the main founders and leaders, the loose organization that existed through the 1920s, and the development of the structured communities that exist in southern Utah today. He then gives his general impressions of the Fundamentalist community, including doctrinal differences with the LDS church and whether or not they should be considered “Mormons.”

Two lectures on Mark Hoffman represent the interest in Mormon issues that is reflected in the larger group of essays. They were given in 1988, after the forger and murderer was sent to prison for his crimes. Thereafter, it took some doing to counteract misconceptions which had arisen based on the counterfeit documents he had circulated.

Here’s a near-800-page book that shouldn’t daunt the average reader! Despite the fact that it’s almost as big as a phone book, the font is a medium-large size which is very readable—even the end notes are not eye-straining.

This collection will delight the reader who enjoys attending lectures by writers and historians such as Jan Shipps, Linda Sillitoe, Levi Peterson, Ken Driggs, Laurel Ulrich, Leonard Arrington, Thomas Alexander, Richard Turley, Ronald Walker, Jill Derr, Lowell Bennion, and many others. I felt privileged to participate in this lecture series via the written word. It was the next best thing to a 30-year annual journey to the red sands of southern Utah.

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