Review
———–
Title: Like a Fiery Meteor: The Life of Joseph F. Smith
Author: Stephen G. Taysom
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Year Published: 2023
Pages: 445
ISBN: 9781647691288
Binding: Trade Paperback
Genre: Biography
Price: $34.95
Reviewed by Kevin Folkman for the Association for Mormon Letters
There has long been a need for a more comprehensive and accurate biography of Joseph F. Smith (JFS), son of the murdered Hyrum Smith, nephew of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints founder Joseph Smith, and sixth president of the church. Previous biographies of JFS have been devotional efforts, one by his son Joseph Fielding Smith (JFS Jr.), another by former First Presidency secretary and general authority Francis Gibbons. These biographies focused on the faith-promoting episodes in the life of JFS, touching only briefly, if at all, on some of his more complicated characteristics.
Stephen C. Taysom, professor of philosophy and comparative religion at Cleveland State University, spent more than a decade researching and writing Like a Fiery Meteor: The Life of Joseph F. Smith, resulting in a more complex and nuanced treatment of JFS. Deprived of a normal family life growing up after the murder of his father and his mother’s early death from illness, JFS struggled with issues of violence, anger, poverty, and a political, cultural, and religious landscape that was constantly changing around him, causing him to never be fully sure of his footing in the world. Taysom’s approach is to avoid trying to analyze JFS, preferring instead to show how JFS reacted to events around him, some of which shook him to the core of his being.
Taysom tracks how the loss of family affected his relationship with his wives and children, especially his fear of illness or injury and the deep grief that he felt over the untimely deaths of family members. His own status as an orphan led him to adopt five children, sympathizing with their loss of parents. With his father a martyr for the LDS church, JFS viewed critics of the church as both enemies of God and personal enemies as well.
Taysom also brings his academic knowledge of other faith traditions and practices to play in subtle ways. He places JFS first in the turbulent era of the 19th century, where technology, culture, economics, and society were in a state of constant change. JFS lived through to the beginning of the 20th century, where the rate of change only accelerated. Religion was also in flux. Taysom quotes religion scholar Thomas Tweed who said, “whatever else religions do, they move across time and space. They are not static. And they have effects. They leave traces” [p 19]. Traveling widely on missions and church business JFS certainly dealt with great changes in the LDS church during his decades in leadership.
Perhaps the most challenging change faced by JFS came while he was a senior apostle and later as President of the Church. JFS married six times, with his first marriage ending in divorce, and continued to support and live with multiple wives after the Manifesto that curtailed and eventually ended plural marriages. In discussing polygamy, Taysom describes the difference between popular and symbolic culture and states that religions “that claim exclusive access to ultimate truth coupled with a belief in an unchanging God must come up with creative ways to disguise, defend, minimize, or explain major changes.” To JFS, the practical reality was that his children would not be able to practice polygamy, “but the suspension of the practice did not invalidate the principle” [p 265]. To JFS, the scriptural evidence had not changed, but the practice had to end to preserve the church and its claim to legitimacy as the “only true church.”
Despite a lack of much formal education, JFS became the church’s foremost scriptural authority during his lifetime. He believed that all church doctrine should be based on scriptural foundations, a view that he passed on to his son Joseph Fielding Smith, ninth president of the church, who then passed it on to his son-in-law Bruce R. McConkie. He frequently included scriptural references in his letters to friends and family members, along with comments in his journals. As the church grew and JFS became more involved in leadership, he worked to impose hierarchical control and a written order in doctrine and policy over the oral traditions that had guided the church since its inception. Foremost on his mind, Taysom writes, were questions that he had over the status of those who had preceded him in death. This resulted in the only officially recognized revelation attributed to JFS, the Vision of the Redemption of the Dead, now canonized as Doctrine and Covenants section 138. In many ways, this revelation closed the circle on his questions about family and eternal life.
Taysom also writes about some of the more difficult aspects of the life of JFS that are not well known. JFS grew up with a strict view of what a man should be, equating masculinity with religiosity. In a letter to his first wife Levira while on his first mission in England, he bemoans spiritual weakness as degrading a man and describes his yearning to be better, more like his mentor and cousin, Apostle George Q. Cannon. This strong sense of masculinity frequently expressed itself in anger and occasionally in physical violence. Levira wrote a letter to Brigham Young accusing JFS of doubling up a rope several times and striking her across the back. JFS also beat a neighbor severely with a walking stick over a dispute about cattle grazing on Smith family farmland.
Much has been written about the tender feelings JFS expressed for his family, especially the children. His journal entries and letters following the untimely deaths of children are well known. He also worried constantly about injuries and illness. Despite these feelings, JFS could also be less than kind towards those closest to him. A letter to one of his sons spends several pages chastising the son in the harshest of terms before revealing the offense. His son had been missing priesthood quorum meetings. Such rebukes were frequent. Corresponding with his plural wife Sarah over a trivial complaint, JFS replied with “furious sarcasm’’ about “my efforts to please and gratify you.”
As Taysom writes in his preface for “Like a Fiery Meteor” (a phrase coined by JFS himself), “JFS, like all human beings, defies easy description and simply refuses facile categorization” [p xii]. Taysom surmounts the easy and facile in this long-awaited and important biography. Some may react negatively to the less savory descriptions Taysom gives of JFS, but for others, recognizing that a president of the church struggled with some of the same weaknesses as the rest of us may find great hope and affirmation in this fully realized portrait of a complex and altogether human being who ascended to the Church’s highest office.