Review
Title: The Selected Letters of Juanita Brooks
Editor: Craig S. Smith
Publisher: The University of Utah Press
Genre: History
Year Published: 2019
Number of Pages: 520 pp.
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-60781-647-8
Price: $45.00
Reviewed by John E. Baucom for the Association for Mormon Letters.
Drawing from a collection of nearly nine hundred letters, Craig S. Smith has compiled an insightful volume of 222 letters by the brilliant Mormon chronicler and historian, Juanita Brooks. Brooks is best known for her courageous and groundbreaking study, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (1950). This work—now an unimpeachable classic within Mormon history—empirically detailed the 1857 massacre of more than one hundred Arkansas emigrants by faithful members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Perhaps greater than her numerous publications, however, Juanita Brooks has come to personify the mid-century intellectual shift that altered how Latter-day Saints engage with and present their history. Brooks’ life and scholarship, as Craig Smith identifies, “served as a bridge to the new, more progressive era” in Mormon historiography (p. 1). And this is what makes The Selected Letters of Juanita Brooks special, it welcomes readers into the influential mind and career of Juanita Brooks.
Selected Letters is intended to present the scope of Brooks’ professional career, from 1941 to 1978. Emphasis has been given to letters that best capture the development of her thoughts, opinions, and faith. Organized chronologically, most letters are addressed to Juanita’s intellectual network of friends, mentors, and colleagues. A few notable examples include: Dale L. Morgan, Fawn McKay Brodie, Leonard J. Arrington, Stewart Udall, Calvin Rampton, George Albert Smith, and LeGrand Richards. Only a handful of letters to family members have been included in this collection. Nevertheless Juanita’s professional letters often include vivid and brief anecdotes pertaining to her personal life. “Please excuse this last error,” she wrote her editor at Stanford University Press, “They just brought in my 14-year-old son with an injury from a foot ball [sic] game” (p. 120).
The collection fittingly opens in 1941 with a letter to Juanita’s life-long mentor, Dale Morgan. Perceptively articulating the heart of their developing friendship, Brooks wrote to Morgan, “I think I’ll have to use you as a sort of safety-valve on some things that trouble me.” And until Morgan’s passing in 1971 Juanita candidly operated this “safety-valve” as she voiced a cornucopia of ecclesiastical and cultural grievances. Typically relying on Morgan’s impartiality, Brooks expressed her frustrations over such issues as: The lack of “forward-thinking Christianity” among Latter-day Saint leadership; the irregular tradition of expunging unfavorable passages from the journals of Mormon pioneers; the washing-over of Mormonism’s polygamous past at the expense of erasing women’s role within the movement; the tactless family separation during the 1953 Short Creek raids; the inexcusable exclusion of persons with African ancestry from the Latter-day Saint priesthood and temple ordinances.
But if there is one statement that best summarizes Brooks’ concerns regarding the Church’s approach to history, it can be found in a 1971 letter to Austin and Alta Fife. “Our great[est] problem in the Church,” Brooks concluded, “is the fact that we cannot accept these early teachings, and our leaders are trying to work up shows and slide sequences to present things as they want the people to believe they were, rather than [as] they actually were” (p. 370).
Aside from airing grievances, Brooks too felt comfortable explaining her faith and continued activity in the Church to both members and non-members alike. “I retain my fellowship in the church,” she again wrote Morgan in 1942, “because I like it and I need it and I want my children to have its benefits, but I refuse to surrender my intellectual independence to it” (p. 22-23). More often, however, Brooks had to compellingly justify her faith in correspondence with other Latter-day Saints. “Ours is the Church of Jesus Christ,” she responded to one former ward member, “it is our business not to be content with error, but to accept truth wherever we find it” (p. 106). In another carefully crafted rebuttal to Arizona Supreme Court Justice and John D. Lee descendant, Jesse Udall, she wrote, “I believed then, as I believe now that nothing but the truth is good enough for the Church to which I belong, and that God does not expect us to lie in His name” (p. 213).
Most evident in this collection is Juanita’s unambiguous conviction that change within the Church—scholarly, culturally, or otherwise—could be gradually achieved only if she remained a member. For better or worse, she understood that her authenticity and careful research depended on her remaining “a member in good standing.” If she were outside the Church, Brooks believed, her work would be more easily dismissed as, “‘Oh, well, she’s an apostate, anyway’” (p. 16). To illustrate this point, Brooks frequently used an allegory from her childhood: “When a cowboy wants to turn a herd of stampeding cattle, he doesn’t run directly counter to them. If he did he’d be run over. He rides with them, and turns them gradually. So if I don’t like the stand of the church, I can do more about it by staying in” (p. 68-69).
But Juanita’s legendary bravery, fearless independence, and unwavering convictions did not develop overnight. Letters from the 1940s and 50s expose a cautious writer and wide-eyed historian. Self-doubt and uncertainty often followed professional setbacks—which especially pained her early career. In 1941, for example, Books had hoped to publish a biography of Jacob Hamblin through a Knopf Fellowship in Biography. Petitioning Dale Morgan for a letter of recommendation, she lamented, “I have not felt that I could do anything that they [Knopf] might consider worthy.” Initially hesitant, she would “screw up courage enough” to submit the application though she would never receive the fellowship (p. 13). Coming to terms with this particular rejection, Brooks confided to Morgan, “I am sure that I must” continue writing and researching the Hamblin biography if I am to have any peace with myself” (p. 23). This is, of course, merely one example in a surprising saga of professional hurdles and pitfalls. Yet each setback seems to have only energized Brooks’ tenacity and courage.
At its best, Selected Letters humanizes the now legendary Juanita Brooks. While reading her letters, it is impossible not to hear the late-night snapping of her typewriter at the center of her finally quieted kitchen. Nor can one escape feeling her urgency in completing a piece of writing before her “cubs storm[ed]” back into the house (p. 24). Other letters—those typically written later in life—are often less rushed and more relaxed. Either way, it is easy to be enveloped by Juanita’s masterful storytelling, then jolted back to reality by her apology for rambling on. For example, after sharing the significance of a recent dream, she wrote, “Please forgive this crazy letter, Gladys [Harrison]. It just oozed out of the machine.” (p. 299). But perhaps no passage humanize this renowned author more than bouts of writer’s despair. In 1943 Brooks defeatedly penned Morgan, “I’ve been so low this week that the under side of a snake’s belly would look like a strip of the milkyway.” Feeling drained and encircled by the ceaseless obligations of housework, she continued, “I do get disgusted at myself when I let a perfectly good forenoon pass and I just fritter about manufacturing things to do because I don’t want to set myself down [to write] and stay there” (p. 31).
The Selected Letters of Juanita Brooks is an inspirational volume for a spectrum of persons interested in Mormon and Utah history. Perhaps more than previous biographies, Craig Smith’s keen curation offers readers a chance to sit with Juanita at her workbench. Readers will catch glimpses of mid-twentieth-century events from Utah’s Dixie—like the conclusion of World War II and the Kennedy assassination—while also spotting the early beginnings of Juanita’s many publications. “So come along,” as Brooks invited one curious visitor, “and I’ll do the best I can—which will be to look through my books.” And, we might add, her letters too (p. 410).