Romig, “Eighth Witness: The Biography of John Whitmer” (reviewed by Andrew Hamilton)

Review
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Title: Eighth Witness: The Biography of John Whitmer
Author: Ronald E Romig
Publisher: John Whitmer Books
Genre: Biography
Year Published: 2015
Number of Pages: 701
Binding: Cloth
ISBN: 978-1-934901-28-1
Price: $49.95

Reviewed by Andrew Hamilton for the Association for Mormon Letters

Despite being a very prominent and important member of the early Joseph Smith Restoration movement, John Whitmer is not very well known today, at least in the LDS branch of the Restoration movement. Most of the “Mormons” that I know (I am a member of the “Utah”/”Mormon” branch of the Restoration movement myself) only know John Whitmer for one or two reasons. If they can tell you anything about him they will likely tell you that he was one of the “Eight Witnesses” of the Book of Mormon, or they may tell you that he was one of the “bad examples” from the Sunday School lessons on people who were early supporters of Joseph Smith, but who later “apostatized” because they were too “weak” or “selfish” to stay in the Church. If they can tell you anything else about him they might be able to repeat an answer that they learned in Sunday school or seminary that while John Whitmer left the Church he never denied his testimony of the Book of Mormon. But mostly he is just a name on a page in the Book of Mormon. This is unfortunate because John Whitmer was not only a very important individual in the early Joseph Smith Restoration movement, he was also a fascinating, complex person who deserves to have his full and correct story known. Ronald Romig, former archivist for the Community of Christ and current director of the historic Kirtland temple, has written an interesting, thoroughly documented, and engagingly written book, “Eighth Witness: The Biography of John Whitmer” that does a lot to correct this historical oversight.

“Eighth Witness” is a hefty and a scholarly book that I believe will interest and engage most students and fans of Joseph Smith restoration history. The biography itself is 506 pages. The text starts with a history of the Whitmer family and the restoration, covers John Whitmer’s time in, responsibilities in, and reasons for leaving the “restored Church.” It discusses his life after “Mormonism,” his death, and concludes with discussing what became of his papers, documents, and artifacts after his death.

At the end of the main text there are 25 lettered appendices that make up the next 90 pages of the book. Among these appendices are a great number of useful and interesting documents including some editorials written by John Whitmer, his patriarchal blessing, a record of Orson Pratt and Joseph F. Smith’s 1878 visit to Far West, various correspondences, and an 1861 revelation received by Davis Whitmer. The remaining 105 pages are made up of the bibliography and index.

There were a number of things that I really enjoyed about this book. As I previously stated, Romig is the former archivist for the Community of Christ and he is currently employed as the director of the Kirtland Temple for them. Considering that he is employed by the Community of Christ, and that he has held two positions that I assume are of high importance to that church — as Church archivist and now as Director of the Kirtland temple — he is likely in regular contact with the leaders of Community of Christ. It would be easy to believe or assume that he would write a book that would favor *their* historical or doctrinal perspective and truth claims over that of other Joseph Smith Restoration-based churches. Instead, Romig has done an excellent job of writing a book that can be read and enjoyed by members of any of the Restoration churches without the reader feeling like they are reading a partisan or polemic book that supports Community of Christ over their church.

“Eighth Witness” has many other strengths. Its greatest strength is what you would hope for from a biography; it provides new and more complete information on its subject. For instance, “Eighth Witness” highlights and explains John Witmer’s role as the first historian of the church started by Joseph Smith. It details the record that he kept, its importance to him, and his efforts to preserve it. It explains in some detail the role that the Whitmer family played in supporting Joseph Smith, their efforts to help to start the infant Church, the callings and responsibilities that they held in the church, and the decisions, events, and changes that caused them to have a falling out with Joseph Smith and leave the church that they sacrificed so much to start and support.

This was perhaps my favorite aspect of “Eighth Witness.” As I previously mentioned, in the lessons that I have received over the years in Sunday School and seminary, John Whitmer has frequently been lumped into lessons on “apostasy” from the Church. In these lessons John and the other Whitmers have usually been reduced into fairly one-dimensional individuals who abandoned the Church in its hour of need during the Kirtland and Missouri crises because they were too proud and worried about self-preservation to continue as members of the restored church.

Romig’s biography provides for the Whitmers a resource that turns them into much more complete and rounded individuals. It details their worries and concerns as the Church and Joseph Smith’s ideas and doctrines expanded and changed. It explains their conflicted feelings as their testimonies of the early restoration were affected by new teachings that they had to reconcile with their early spiritual experiences. The John Whitmer and Whitmer family of “Eighth Witness” are not the same Whitmers that I had previously learned about and that is a very good thing.

Other strengths of the book can be found in its assembly and details. I love information. I love context. I am not the type to have my hunger satiated by reading just the main text of a book. I want context. I want background. I’m a proud history nerd who wants to know as much as possible about who and what I am reading. I love appendixes, notes, bibliographies, and indexes. In these respects I give “Eighth Witness” high marks. The use of footnotes instead of end notes was something that I really enjoyed about this volume. Footnotes may turn some casual readers off and they may add to the complexity of production and cost of a book, but they are well worth it in their providing ease of access to the sources and information being used in the text. I loved the footnotes in “Eighth Witness”; they were very useful in my research and I feel that they will be useful to all reader of the book. The previously mentioned appendixes are great and loaded with supplementary information and the bibliography and index are very well done.

As I have tried to express, “Eighth Witness” is an excellent book, and Ronald Romig is to be highly commended in his efforts. I do, however, have some criticisms of the book. I will try to share these criticisms very carefully, fully admitting that Romig’s research is generally very well done and his knowledge of restoration history far outstrips mine. With that said, the criticisms or disagreements that I have with “Eighth Witness” mostly relate to editorial choices made by Romig and the publisher and are not as much about Romig’s writing or about historical facts contained in the book and Romig’s interpretations of them.

The major complaint that I have concerns the name/designation of the book itself as “The Biography of John Whitmer.” “Eighth Witness” is an excellent book. I enjoyed reading it. It certainly contains a lot of historical and biographical information. But as I read it I never really felt like I was reading the biography of John Whitmer. In many of the chapters, especially many of the earlier chapters, it felt more as if I were reading a history of the restoration in general than I was reading a biography of John Whitmer. In much of the rest of the book it seemed like David Whitmer got equal if not more time in the text than John did. For instance, in Chapter 3, “Completing the Book of Mormon Translation” (pp35-47) David Whitmer is quoted, written about, or referred to on all but maybe one page. John, on the other hand, gets essentially one paragraph where it is mentioned that he “assisted us very much in writing during the remainder of the work [of translating the Book of Mormon]”, that Dean Jesse identified his handwriting in the Book of Mormon manuscript, and then there is a quote by Myron Bond, an early RLDS missionary, that gives his testimony of having heard John Whitmer share his testimony of the Book of Mormon translation (see p 36-37).

A very similar thing happens in chapters 20-23 which are supposed to document John Whitmer’s break with the Church and Joseph Smith, and then gives the story of the beginning of his life outside of the Church. However, once again, David Whitmer is the primary focus of these chapters. For example, chapter 20, “A Gathering to Missouri: A Ragged Break” starts with this sentence: “While the spiritual dimension of Mormonism buttressed *David Whitmer’s* reliance on the Restoration gospel, his faith in Jospeh Smith as a prophet continued to waiver” (p. 314). The chapter continues on in this vein, talking mainly about *David Whitmer*, along with many mentions of Oliver Cowdery and William W. Phelps for the next several pages. No significant mention of John Whitmer occurs until seven and a half pages into the chapter and even that largely focuses on what John had to say about Oliver Cowdery and not what John himself was feeling, doing, or experiencing (p. 321).

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that this is a bad or a poor book. It is excellent, and I did learn things about John Whitmer. I just don’t think that the title fits the content. In my opinion a better title for this book would be something like “The Whitmer Witness of the Restoration.”

A related criticism to the book’s confused subject matter is the way that Romig refers throughout the book to John Whitmer. He constantly and mostly just simply writes of him as “John.” Many people consider it unprofessional for a writer of a biography refer to their subject in a familiar way like this, but, since this book is as much about David Whitmer as it is about John Whitmer, it sort of makes sense as I suppose that just calling him “Whitmer” might confuse the reader as to just which Whitmer was being written about.

My second criticism is that Romig seems a little unsure of just who his audience for “Eighth Witness” is. At 701 pages and with a 50 dollar price tag this is a hefty book. It is full of detailed and scholarly footnotes and has the previously mentioned excellent and long set of appendices. Also, and let’s be honest here, the book’s stated subject is an unfortunately obscure participant in the Joseph Smith Restoration movement. All of these things would tend to alienate the casual reader in favor of those with a more serious interest in Restoration history. To me this means that most people who will commit to the price and time for this book will already have a strong background in reading and studying Restoration history. Also, much of the writing, especially later in the book, seems to be aimed at that more scholarly audience. Yet many of the early chapters seem to be written to an audience with little or no background in the history of the Restoration movement. These chapters spend quite a bit of time giving information, details, and history on Joseph Smith and the Smith family, the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, and the establishing of the Church, that do not directly relate to John Whitmer and were not necessary to tell his story. They are details that are only necessary for a first time or newer reader of Restoration history. I feel like these chapters could have been shorter and more succinct and still made their point.

Another stylistic/editorial choice that bothered me is related somewhat to what I just mentioned about audience. It involves some of the choices of quotes and terminology that are used by Romig in certain places in the book. Let me share some examples of some of these choices that I found to be odd. Chapter 4 is about John Whitmer’s calling as a “Missionary and Witness.” In this chapter Romig discusses the release of the Book of Mormon to the public. As alluded to in a previous paragraph, despite the fact that this book is largely aimed at those already experienced with Restoration history and doctrine, Romig includes what amounts to a page long description of the Book of Mormon story. Instead of just taking a few sentences or even a paragraph to summarize and describe the content of the Book of Mormon in his own words, which Romig is immensely qualified to do, he uses two paragraph-long quotations, one by Marvin Hill and one from Newell and Avery’s “Mormon Enigma,” to explain the Book of Mormon story. I realize that all disciplines are different, and Romig likely has very good reasons why these paragraphs tell the story better than he felt that he could have. But for me it was odd.

When I was working on my master’s degree I had to learn APA style writing and practice writing articles that could potentially be published in psychological journals. I was taught that, in that field of scholarly writing, I should avoid long quotations as much as possible and instead try to use my own words to explain what I was trying to say. So for me the choice by a scholar as fine as Romig to use someone else’s words to tell what he could have here was weird. Especially when it was probably not really necessary for him to explain what the story of the Book of Mormon is to readers who most likely have known the Book of Mormon story for years or even for their entire lives.

There are a few more odd editorial choices that I would share. When discussing the “Mormon War in Missouri,” in the body text of the book, Romig uses the archaic/non-scholarly, now known to be incorrect spelling of “Haun’s Mill” to describe the Mormon settlement that was attacked in a “massacre” that resulted in the loss of 18 Mormon lives. But then, in the footnotes, he uses the correct, currently understood, more scholarly spelling of “Hawn’s Mill” (see pp 366-368).

As I hopefully made clear earlier in this review one of the things that I *LOVED* about “Eighth Witness” is that overall it is written from a very “Restorationist” perspective and has a tone that can be enjoyed by anyone with a Joseph Smith movement background rather than appealing particularly to a specific branch of the movement such as the LDS Mormons or the members of the Community of Christ. So I found it strange and out of place when, in writing of actions that took place during the Kirtland and Missouri era, that Romig twice uses the anachronistic and more specifically LDS term “General Authorities” to describe leaders of the Church (see pages 309 and 358). The term “General Authorities” would not be used by the “LDS Church” until the Utah period, and to my understanding is not used by the Community of Christ or other Restorationist Churches.

I would mention two more critical points. Overall, the maps, pictures, and illustrations in “Eighth Witness” are excellent and really add to the experience of reading the book. John Hamer’s maps are particularly excellent and there are a number of historic, rare, and interesting photos in the book. All of these excellent illustrations make the one on page 278 stick out like a sore thumb. It is a sketch/drawing of the interior of the Kirtland temple with five individuals standing in it. The problem is, especially when compared to the rest of the images, this one looks like a grainy, pixley, comic book sort of drawing. Its inclusion just did not work for me.

This is the last critical thought that I will share. Over all the research and depth of “Eighth Witness” is, in my opinion, excellent. But there is at least place where Romig “dropped the ball” so to speak. On page 401 Romig states:

“In early 1844, John, still in Far West, wrote to WW Phelps in Nauvoo, Illnois. Although the letter *has not survived,* he evidently asked about Phelps’s prospects among the saints and mentioned church records, apparently an allusion to John’s manuscript history.”

Well, in this case Romig’s research was incorrect. The letter does in fact survive. My fellow book and Restoration history lover Joe Geisner pointed out to me that this letter is in the possession of the LDS Church and can be found in the LDS Church History Library where it is designated “MS 21600” and can be found in box 1, folder 4, pp 5-8. Would the inclusion of this letter have changed the story that Romig shares about Whitmer? No, I don’t think so. But it would have made the story more complete, and saying that the letter no longer exists, only to have it be found in an accessible collection by an amateur historian, doesn’t look so great either.

While I offer these critical views on a few issues that I personally had with “Eighth Witness” I still want to praise it as an important and needed book. It opens up a door on one of the most important families in the Restoration. It provides new details on individuals and expands our understanding of important events from the founding and earlier years of Joseph Smith’s work. It gives John Whitmer and the Whitmer family the dimension that they have so long deserved. The price tag is big, and the investment in time to read “Eighth Witness” will not be small or casual, but it will be worth it.

I commend Romig’s book to all with an interest in the Restoration and hope that he continues to write about the early history and members of the Joseph Smith Restoration movement.