Review
Title: Harold B Lee: Life and Thought
Author: Newell G Bringhurst
Publisher: Signature Books
Genre: Biography
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 156
Binding: Paper; E-Book
ISBN: Paperback, 978-1-56085-443-2; E-Book B09HHP5JFK
Price: Paper, 9.99; E-Book, 4.99
Reviewed by Andrew Hamilton for the Association of Mormon Letters
As 1999 ticked down to the year 2000, Time Magazine used the still fairly newfangled World Wide Web to pull off a publicity stunt. Readers were encouraged to submit names for one of the first online polls; people could vote on these names to help Time choose their “Person of the Century.” President Gordon B. Hinckley’s name ended up on the poll. I was attending BYU at the time. Many students forwarded chain emails around campus giving numerous reasons why it was our duty to vote for President Hinckley as the “Person of the Century.” One of the primary reasons these students gave for why we should vote for President Hinckley was that he was the most important/most significant LDS church president of the twentieth century. This sparked annoyance among some of the teachers and staff who remembered the 1960s. They believed if there was a “most important” church president of the twentieth century, it was David O. McKay. The students and the faculty of BYU in 1999 would be surprised to learn that they were both wrong. While McKay and Hinckley were two of the longest-serving church presidents of the twentieth century, it may be Harold B. Lee, who was church president for only seventeen months, who deserves the title of “Most Important Church President of the Twentieth Century.”
Does this claim shock you? If so, you will want to check out Harold B Lee: Life and Thought; by historian, author, and scholar Newell Bringhurst. In the introduction to his book Bringhurst claims:
I contend that Lee was among the most important twentieth-century LDS leaders. His impact on the church was considerable over the thirty years that he served as a general authority … Lee distinguished himself as the facilitator of the LDS Church Welfare Program … Lee further served the church in refining and implementing Correlation—a long-range program to streamline the church’s organizational structure and upgrade its various programs and educational curricula. As church president … he pushed Correlation forward in response to the church’s changing demographics, especially its rapid expansion into an international organization. (ix)
Intrigued? Curious? Tempted? And yet, you say, there have been two previous biographies on Harold B Lee, so why another? Bringhurst responds:
I believe Lee deserves a new biography because his central role as the major architect of modern Mormonism has not received sufficient attention in previous studies. (x)
While Harold B Lee: Life and Thought is only 156 pages long, I believe that Bringhurst successfully proves his theory that Lee did have a central role as a major architect of Modern Mormonism.
Life and Thought is divided into nine chapters and an epilogue. The first three chapters cover Lee’s early life and pre-general church service years. Chapter four focuses on Lee’s call to develop the LDS Church Welfare Program in 1935 and his call to be an apostle in 1941. Chapters five through seven discuss Lee’s years as an apostle, chapter eight addresses his time as a counselor in the first presidency to Joseph Fielding Smith, and chapter nine details Lee’s brief service as president of the church. The epilogue is titled “Personality, Teachings, Legacy.”
Bringhurst did extensive research for a book that isn’t much longer than a novella. While he frequently cites Harold B. Lee: Prophet and Seer by Lesley Brent Goates and Harold B. Lee: Man of Vision, Prophet of God by Francis M. Gibbons,[1] he uses them because they had access to papers and documents that are not available to the public. When he cites their research past Lee’s early years, he effectively distills the portions of their work that he feels demonstrates Lee’s important contributions to the development of modern Mormonism. The book lacks a bibliography, so you have to pick through the footnotes to identify all of Bringhurst’s many sources, so I will say that he has a great many diverse resources that he cites in this book.
As evidence that Lee was “the major architect of modern Mormonism” Bringhurst spends a lot of time detailing Lee’s role in developing the LDS Welfare plan and his efforts main driver behind the LDS Church’s correlation program. Bringhurst also includes detailed information on many of Lee’s thoughts and beliefs, including his feelings on race and Blacks and the priesthood, politics, secularization in the twentieth century, the sexual revolution, the role of women, and many other subjects. Bringhurst also manages to work in intriguing facts and information about many of Lee’s contemporaries in the LDS leadership including J Reuben Clark, David O McKay, Marion G Romney, Nathan Eldon Tanner, Alvin R Dyer, Spencer W Kimball, Ezra Taft Benson, Gordon B Hinckley and more. Life and Thought may be short, but it is packed with fascinating and important information. Readers will gain great insights from nearly every page.
I did notice one minor error in the book. Chapter Five covers the decade 1941 to 1951. On page 59, Bringhurst notes that one of the changes that occurred as the LDS church experienced growth was that J Reuben Clark authorized the creation of the general authority office of “Assistants to the Quorum of the Twelve” to assist in governing and administrating the Church. Bringhurst states that these men were “a new category of apostle.” Based on my research, this is not accurate. The men who were called to be Assistants to the Quorum of the Twelve were not ordained or set apart to the priesthood office of apostle; they were ordained to the office of high priest[2].
Harold B Lee: Life and Thought is the first volume in Signature Book’s new “Brief Mormon Lives series.” These books are short and basic. The first two volumes averaged under 150 pages. They have footnotes but no index or bibliography. They are available in paperback for under ten dollars and as E-books for under five. While these books are brief in length and simple in form, both of the released volumes have done an excellent job of illuminating the lives of their subjects[3].
I was born not long after Harold B Lee became the eleventh president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Since Lee was a “young” seventy-three years old, church members expected that he would be president of the church for some time. But by the time that I could toddle about, he was already gone. I know about Lee because I am a nerd who reads a lot of books. Most modern Mormons know very little about Lee other than his time as prophet was very short. He is not as well studied as he deserves to be, Newell Bringhurst has demonstrated that. Harold B Lee: Life and Thought is an excellent resource for those who want to understand the life and contributions of this understudied and key twentieth-century LDS leader.
[1] Lesley Brent Goates was Lee’s son-in-law and Francis M. Gibbons was for many years a secretary to the First Presidency and later was a member of the Second Quorum of Seventy. Their positions gave them access to documents not available to the other researchers.
[2] According to Bruce R McConkie, in Mormon Doctrine, under the entry for Assistants to the 12, “They are high priests, not apostles” (second edition, page 56 ). The individual who edited the Wikipedia article on Assistants to the Twelve agrees, “Like counselors in the First Presidency, Assistant to the Twelve was not a distinct priesthood office—rather, it was a calling that any worthy high priest could be asked to fill.” Alvin R Dyer was called as an Assistant to the Twelve in 1958. In 1967 he was ordained an apostle by David O. McKay. This demonstrates that he was not ordained an apostle when he was called as an Assistant. Thirteen of the Assistants were later added to the Quorum of the Twelve. The dates of their ordination as apostles are given as when they entered the Twelve, not when they became Assistants to the Twelve.
[3] The second volume, D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian, by Gary Topping, was released in April 2022