Prince, “Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History” (reviewed by Dennis Clark)

Review
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Title: Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History
Author: Gregory A. Prince
Publisher: Salt Lake City : University of Utah Press
Genre: Biography
Year Published: 2016
Number of pages: 540
Binding: Hardback
ISBN10: n/a
ISBN13: 978-1-60781-479-5
Price: $39.95

Reviewed by Dennis Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters

Let me state at the outset that I love this book! When it came up for review, I wrote to the reviews editor that “I would be especially interested in Prince’s *Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History*. I worked with Arrington at the Church Historical Department in the late 70s, as an archivist rather than as a historian, but I found him very interested in my concerns when I had occasion to meet with him. It’s a fascinating look at the Historical Department, and at Arrington’s work as Church Historian, and a broad overview of historiography in general, and the writing of history related to the LDS Church in particular.

Reading this book was a nostalgia trip. It helped me remember three highlights of my time working in the Historical Department: 1) working alongside Dean Jessee in the Library, 2) the announcement of the priesthood being available to all males, and 3) talking with Leonard Arrington about Mormoniad.

This is a large book, more than twice the size of Arrington’s own *Adventures of a Church Historian*, which he saw through the press in 1998, less than a year before he died. But Prince covers more ground than did Arrington, devoting 55 pages to Arrington’s childhood and young manhood, and, after the end of his tenure as Church Historian, 90 pages to the rest of his career — more than Arrington gave those years.

This was possible because Arrington’s papers “included some twenty thousand pages of diaries” (page ix) among the “astounding 319 linear feet of Leonard’s papers at the Merrill-Cazier Library at Utah State University” (x). (Archivists measure collections in linear feet, as if the documents, which are filed in folders inside boxes, were laid flat and stacked up, which is why the 319 feet is so astounding.)

This wealth of material made the scope of the task roughly equivalent to what Prince faced in writing *David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism* — but for that book he had a co-author, Wm. Robert Wright. Writing this one without a co-author took about as long as that did — a decade. In addition to all the Arrington archive, Prince conducted 100 interviews with people who knew Arrington (or his work), and “made complete transcripts of the recorded interviews” (xi). He’d done the same thing for the McKay biography. The resulting breadth and depth of this biography is nothing short of astounding. Though lacking a co-author, Prince had able aid. He acknowledges Cory Larson as a research assistant; but to Alicia Kimball must go the larger credit, for scanning and typing “into the computer thousands of pages of Leonard’s diary entries and other documents” (xv). But even with their help, this book was a massive undertaking.

In a book this big, with so much source material, and with the limited scope of the book relative to those resources, there are bound to be some problems. And in a book this personal, some editorial decisions with which the reviewer may disagree. For example, Prince always refers to Arrington as “Leonard” rather than the more conventional “Arrington”. This seems to be explained when he says, “I never met David O. McKay…. [but] I met Leonard on several occasions … once on a more intimate level when I met him at his home and recorded his reminiscences of President McKay. Moreover, I served in the Brazilian South Mission at the same time as his son James” (xi).

I read all of the notes. And because they are endnotes, and the book is studded with them, I had to keep flipping back and forth between text and notes, which slowed my reading. Some other authors who also put a lot of information in their notes use footnotes. I suppose that is an editorial decision by Prince, or possibly his publisher, but I miss footnotes.

A minor distraction arose in the way Prince documents some matters. That’s due to his process in writing the book. He discusses Arrington’s life and activities topically as well as chronologically. He often quotes from Arrington’s diary, and usually it’s clear what he’s doing. But on page 130 he notes that Arrington delivered a speech called “Why I Am a Believer” in the Sunstone Symposium on August 28, 1983. This was after the dissolution of the Historical Department and the move of most of its historians, including Arrington, to BYU. Prince writes: “Five months later [after the address, but before its publication], Leonard became aware that he had been targeted by a particularly energetic and zealous defender of the faith at Brigham Young University, Louis Midgley…. In a private diary notation, Leonard responded to Midgley’s diatribe with characteristic grace” (131). The citation is to Arrington’s diary entry for July 9, 1985. Prince does not describe the nature of Midgley’s “diatribe,” nor where it was delivered, nor does he say how Arrington became aware of it. And he does not address why Arrington wrote of it after a lapse of 18 months. Perhaps he does not know. Perhaps he has only Arrington’s reaction to go on. But he discusses Arrington’s reaction for three long paragraphs, most of a page. If the incident deserved most of a page of discussion, the note should at least indicate what Prince knows about the “diatribe” — or doesn’t know.

In a case where he does comment on a diary entry, this process is clearer. On page 229, in a chapter on women in Leonard’s life, in Mormon history and in historiography, called “Blessed Damozels,” Prince says “If anything, he [Arrington] argued, Mormon women had outperformed Mormon men.” Then he quotes Arrington:

“Two sisters were among those who saw the Gold Plates from which our founding Prophet Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon. The sisters assisted materially in the construction of the Kirtland and Nauvoo temples. The sisters demonstrated the same resourcefulness and intrepidity in crossing the Plains to Utah as did the brethren. As one of the sisters wrote, ‘We had to endure all that the brethren endured, and we had to endure the brethren as well.'”

Now if you’re like me, outside of the question of whether they were genetic sisters, two things jump out of this paragraph: Two sisters saw the gold plates — who were they? And, which sister wrote that joke in the last sentence? So I turned to the endnotes. The citation is to a diary entry of Arrington’s for July 17, 1975, about midway through his tenure as Church Historian. The citation is followed by a 7-line paragraph in small type written by Prince:

“Mary Whitmer, mother of David Whitmer, one of the three witnesses, and also mother of Christian, Jacob, Peter Jr., and John Whitmer (four of the eight witnesses), was shown the plates by an angel as a blessing for assuming the extra chores of hosting Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, who lived with the Whitmers while finishing the translation of the Book of Mormon. The second woman was Emma Smith, who did not see the plates but who touched them as they lay, wrapped in cloth, on the table, moved them about as she worked, and remembered the rustling sound their edges made as she ran her thumb down them.”

That’s the entire note. I happen to know that Emma Smith recorded that memory of handling the plates long after her husband was assassinated, in a letter to her son Joseph Smith III, after the Reorganization. But I had never heard of the blessing given to Mary Whitmer. And I can’t tell from the note whether Arrington identifies the “two sisters” in his diary entry, either before or after the initial quote, or whether Prince is writing from his own knowledge. I would have appreciated a citation in the note to his or Arrington’s sources — as well as to the joker and the joke. Prince is correcting Arrington: why?

On the other hand, Prince usually explains clearly. A perfect counter-example is a note on page 488, note 42, in which Prince does an excellent job of analyzing an incident that takes up 3 paragraphs on page 236, and corrects Arrington’s diary entry, and thus the record. I’d reproduce it here, but it’s over half a page of fine print. Go read the book!

Even with such minor flaws, this is a marvelous portrait of the man and his milieu. I cannot emphasize enough how heroic Prince and his assistants were in taking on this task. And I am grateful for Prince’s liberal use of interviews with people who knew Arrington. I know a fair number of them from my time in the Historical Department, and I can stand as a witness not only to Prince’s accuracy, but to that of the interviewees. And I very much appreciate the generosity of their memories of Arrington. This excerpt from one of the interviews, with Lavina Fielding Anderson, is typical. As an editor at the *Ensign* she published “many of the first articles of the History Division,” says Prince. I recall reading those articles, and savoring them. I savor her assessment of Arrington equally:

“Whatever it was, it always delighted him. He always seemed to have such relish for what he was doing. I think that’s why there was such a positive attitude in the division. People weren’t afraid of him, even though they probably had reason to be. There was no sense that they were doing anything inappropriate. . . . When you work for the Church you see a lot of stuffed shirts. . . . Leonard was so real. . . . I wanted to be Leonard when I grew up” (90-91 — the omissions are Prince’s). Even more generous is Anderson’s comment from the back cover of the book: “This biography breaks your heart a little, stiffens your spine a lot, and makes you fall in love with a man who may be his generation’s best human being.” That’s a huge promise; the book keeps it.

Anderson also features in a telling example of Arrington’s kindness. Describing her as “Someone who *was* excommunicated as part of the September Six in 1993”, events covered in chapter 29 as occurring late in Arrington’s career (97 — emphasis in original), Prince says that “Leonard invited her and her husband to the History Division’s Christmas party at his home and asked her to give the opening prayer and blessing on the food.” Prince then lets Anderson explain why this was a kindness: “Since praying in a public Church meeting is one of the things specifically forbidden by excommunication, he could not have said in stronger terms that I have a valued, even a cherished, place in his world.” The source is an e-mail to Prince from Anderson of May 8, 2014, six years after the interview reported above, and over 20 years after the party. It clearly does mean a lot to her still, to have Arrington extend her that kindness.

There are many examples of that kind of joy, but Prince does not shy away from painful moments in Leonard’s career. The heart of the book is an analysis of his effect, as Church Historian, on the writing of Mormon history. Arrington was called by N. Eldon Tanner to be Church Historian on 6 January 1972, replacing Howard W. Hunter (161). He was released on 25 January 1982 (343), and transferred to BYU. His calling represented a major change in the Church Historian’s role, and that upset many people in the Church. Much of Prince’s narrative concerns the forces conspiring against Arrington and his projects. One of those projects, perhaps his main project, was the writing of a Sesquicentennial History of the Church, to update and complement B. H. Roberts’s *Comprehensive History* published in 1930, at the centennial of the founding of the Church. The project had been approved by the First Presidency under Harold B. Lee, in a “communication from the First Presidency dated September 13, 1972, and signed by Presidents Tanner and [Marion G.] Romney” (168).

A month later, Arrington and his colleagues “had sixteen subjects and sixteen authors committed to the project. Furthermore, the church’s Deseret Book Company agreed to publish the series” (170). In fact, contracts had been signed (332). To date, only nine of the sixteen volumes have been published, because the project was cancelled. Prince attributes that to one of Arrington’s blind spots. He was not an administrator, had in fact avoided administrative tasks when they were offered at Utah State University, and thus he did not understand the politics in the Church Administrative Building. Prince writes “… Leonard and his colleagues failed to grasp the existential threat that the series represented to the religious worldview of several apostles, and thus were genuinely shocked when the series was ultimately cancelled in spite of the First Presidency’s initial approval….” and those signed contracts (170). The opposition initially came from two senior apostles, Ezra Taft Benson and Mark E. Petersen, whose views were shared and later amplified by Boyd K. Packer. The story plays out over thirteen chapters and 268 pages, and Prince’s analysis of the politics involved must have been whetted by his study of the life of President McKay. Despite the support of Harold B. Lee, Spencer W. Kimball and Howard W. Hunter, as apostles and as church presidents, Benson, Petersen and Packer managed to dismantle the History Division. They did this through the agency of G. Homer Durham and Gordon B. Hinckley (who had served together as missionary companions in Great Britain). Hinckley was called as a third counselor in Kimball’s presidency on July 23, 1981 (according to Wikipedia). By then the job was done.

I lived through this period, having been hired in late December, 1976. Durham came on board on April 27, 1977 (292), but I didn’t react with alarm as some others had. And Durham, who I learned was trained in political science and had been a university president, seemed a good choice to me. By then I was working in the archives. Prince notes that “Durham’s first meeting with the entire division on May 3, 1977, sent shock waves through the already nervous members of the History Division, though more for tone and nuance than substance” (298). I was at that meeting, and picked up on a little of that shock. But James B. Allen, one of Arrington’s assistant church historians, gives a better recollection that I have. In an interview “almost three decades later” he gives this response:

“The first talk that he gave to us . . . was ‘You have to be careful. You have to write your history in the image of Brother Benson.’ I don’t know whether he meant the same thing that it implied to me. I think what he meant was, ‘You have to remember that Brother Benson and other people are going to be concerned about what comes out of the Historical Department.’ I think that’s what he was saying. But just that term frightened me, as a scholar, and I know it frightened other people, as scholars” (298). I was also present on May 4, 1978, when “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'” (303; the quote is from Arrington’s diary, and is as I remember it).

Hinckley and Durham may have been acting to save the division and its staff. Prince quotes an extensive excerpt from the latter’s journal, part of which goes to his motive:

“The future, including the individual welfare and well-being of the staff of the History Division, has continued to occupy a major portion of my thoughts throughout 1979, as it has since May 1977. Increasingly it has become clear that the desire of the Twelve is to have scholarly research published, researched, and written on the basis of individual initiative, and responsibility, both in the interests of the Church long-range, and of the individuals themselves…. It has long been clear to me, and I presume to many of the Twelve, that a function such as obtained in the past in the History Division since 1972, is more properly the function of a university” (347-8). I have excerpted here a far longer journal entry supplied to Prince by George H. Durham II, the son of G. Homer Durham, probably in 2011 when Prince interviewed George (who was my children’s pediatrician from the time of our first arrival in Salt Lake in 1976). This illustrates Prince’s concern for fairness and thoroughness, as well as his ability to find source material.

The entire story of the dismantling of the History Division is fascinating, and another reason for you to read the book. But despite these conflicts, and the toll they took on him, Arrington could still laugh at himself. In another of Prince’s fine interviews, Arrington’s daughter Susan tells a story, that Arrington himself also related, about “when he had to work late in his office” [Prince’s summary], apparently while his office was still in the Church Administration Building: “This secretary was staying there to help him. He came out at a certain time and said, ‘Could you go across the street and get me a can of Coke?’ So she went across the street, got the Coca Cola, and put it in a brown paper bag and took it into the building. He took it, disappeared into his office, and maybe 45 minutes later came out, put the empty Coke can in this brown paper bag, stapled it shut, and dropped it in the garbage” (100). A performance worthy of his son James, who is an actor — if only for an audience of one.

I don’t know how Susan knew that story, but Arrington told it to me when I spoke with him about an item I had come across in the Church Library. I heard the story in the Church Office Building. He indicated that the place “across the street” was a market on the northwest corner of North Temple and East Temple — what is now the southeast corner of the LDS Conference Center. As I recall, there was such a stapled-shut bag in his garbage can, which may have sparked the story.

Arrington called himself an “entrepreneur” of history, a designation which Prince explicates: “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” (57). And, partly because of his research for his doctoral dissertation, which was done in the Church archives, he had many such notes.

Throughout the book, Prince expands convincingly on this theme, with many examples of Arrington’s generosity. To Richard Bushman, it was almost a reflex: “He didn’t fill the air with sentiments. He filled it with good feeling and cheer, but if you asked him a question he’d come up with some concrete incident, some fact. His mind was just stuffed with all these realities” (102, from another of Prince’s fine interviews).

I do not want to leave the impression that Prince overlooks Arrington’s flaws. One, to which Prince returns almost as a leitmotif, is Arrington’s treatment of his first wife, Grace Fort Arrington. Prince lets her speak, quoting her autobiography printed in 1977: “Leonard has strong powers of concentration, and perhaps this helps explain why he has been able to write as much as he has, both at the office and at home. If he is working on something and I come up and kiss him, he just pats me on the head as if he were reaching out to pat a puppy. Sometimes this preoccupation gets to me and I rebel against his failure to pay proper attention to me.” Of this vignette, Prince says “Unfortunately for the reader, Grace chose not to elaborate on the nature of her rebellion” (102).

The vignette is funny. Prince’s comment is droll. But there may be an explanation of that lack of elaboration — in the bibliography. The note lists the source as “Cornwall and Arrington, *I’m Glad My House Burned Down*, 182” (475, n 49). You would think that the Arrington would be Grace. But the full entry in the bibliography says “Cornwall, Rebecca F., and Leonard J. Arrington, eds. *I’m Glad My House Burned Down: The Personal Story of Grace Fort Arrington*. Salt Lake City, privately distributed, 1977” — almost as if Grace did not write it at all, since it is listed under Cornwall. Prince does not discuss how the book was written, or by whom.

Prince discusses far more serious instances of Arrington’s seemingly oblivious treatment of Grace. The most extensive is chapter 24, “Grace’s Decline,” in which the effects on her health of the move from Logan to Salt Lake City are detailed, which is also a topic at the end of chapter 18, in a section titled “Grace in Salt Lake City.” But he addresses the topic in many places.

If anything, though, Prince is harder on Arrington in discussing his book *Brigham Young: American Moses*, written during the dissolution of the Historical Division, but published in 1985, after Arrington had moved to Brigham Young University. Prince presents an even-handed evaluation of the book, and gives free rein to critical reviews (the reviews are presented on pp. 401-406). And there were many criticisms offered in reviews. One reviewer commented that Arrington said almost nothing about the Mountain Meadows massacre; other reviewers took him to task for his failure to discuss the Church’s policy of not ordaining Blacks to the priesthood. Enough was then known to conclude that Brigham Young was the source. Other reviewers faulted him for not really going into some of Young’s theological teachings, such as the Adam-God doctrine and his teachings on blood atonement, the latter of which may have helped the perpetrators justify the Mountain Meadows massacre. Perhaps most damning, though, was a review by Jan Shipps, which faulted him for lapses in his noted generosity of spirit. She pointed out that he had used much of Ronald Esplin’s doctoral dissertation, “The Emergence of Brigham Young and the Twelve to Mormon Leadership” without what she felt was adequate acknowledgment. She describes Arrington’s reaction to her review this way:

“Leonard said, ‘You can give us honest reviews of the materials that we publish.’ And when I gave him an honest review of his book on Brigham Young, he was so hurt! It just killed him. He was really upset! But what I did in that review was to say that a lot of it came straight out of Ron Esplin’s dissertation, which it did. Leonard said, ‘Ron helped me. Ron works for me.’ He didn’t say, ‘I took all of Ron’s work and published it so he cannot publish anything'” (401). Speaking in an interview with Prince 23 years later, her disappointment couldn’t have been expressed more strongly. She brushes aside his explanation: “Leonard told me this in this same conversation that the Brethren wanted him to put his name on everything that came out of the Historical Department.”

Despite such lapses, especially in Arrington’s later year, Prince obviously has a great affection for him, with all his faults. I share that affection. While I was working in the archives, I went up to his office to discuss with him an oddity I had stumbled across in the library. It was a small volume, 100 pages, containing a 95-page poem titled *Mormoniad.* The other 5 pages were notes — endnotes. It was published anonymously in Boston in 1858 by A. Williams & Co., in the then-honorable genre of mock-epic, represented by such other works as Alexander Pope’s *Dunciad* and Ebenezer Cook’s *The Sotweed Factor, or A Voyage to Maryland, A Satyr*. It is a sophisticated poem in cleverly-rhymed iambic tetrameter, broadly satirical of Mormons, displaying a familiarity with Mormon life in Salt Lake City and before. The author cites his sources in the notes. In his headnote, he emphatically states: “The author wishes to have it distinctly understood that he is not one of the Mormons, and therefore not responsible for any of their language or sentiments, applied or expressed, in the poem.” Most of his sources were published in 1857 and 1858 in New York; *Mormoniad* was published on September 10th, 1858.

I asked Leonard if he knew who had written it. He said he did not, but thought it could have been James Russell Lowell, although no one had been able to pin it on him. He suggested that it might have been John Greenleaf Whittier, or Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., both of whom had a history of publishing anonymously. He said he’d never had time to track it down. But he knew of it.

I didn’t have time to track it down either. G. Homer Durham was then in the process of dismantling the History Division and slimming down the Archives and Library staff. Ron Esplin told me one day, early in my employment, about a method the historians had used to make the point that they were underpaid. As at BYU, staff members signed an agreement not to talk about salaries with each other. So he and others instead did a study of the economics of living and raising a family in Salt Lake City, and talked about how their salaries were inadequate to that task, and to what degree, without comparing salaries. Since Leonard was trained as an economist, I can’t help but wonder if he suggested the strategy. Esplin discussed the study in an interview with Prince, saying that the personnel office had told one historian that he would “never in my lifetime earn more than $8,000 a year if I stay here” (which happened before the dismantling began). That sparked the study and its submission to their supervisors. Esplin reports: “A month later, when they came back to us, they said, ‘This has made no difference, but if you ever do it again, you will be fired.’ But within the next year, we got substantial raises. So it did make a difference” (198). That was before my time. I was hired in late December, 1976, and left in late January, 1979. But the tactic that sparked that rebellion was applied to me as the staff was being thinned. My division manager, Ron Watt, told me that I would never get another raise for as long as I worked in the Archives, or for the Church. So I left, and went to work for a different bureaucracy, the City of Orem, as a librarian.

That’s my witness (and if any of you know who wrote Mormoniad, contact me in the comments section below). That’s what I saw. And I can testify that Prince has produced a fine book. Read *Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History*. It’s honest history, clear-eyed, well-documented, and a pleasure to read.