Collected Leonard J Arrington Mormon History Lectures

Introduction

vii Introduction The establishment of a lecture series honoring a library’s special collection and a donor to that collection is unique. Special Collections and Archives, Utah State University Libraries, houses the personal and historical collection of Leonard J. Arrington, a renowned scholar of the American West. As part of Arrington’s gift to the university, he requested that the university’s historical collection become the focus for an annual lecture on an aspect of Mormon history. Utah State agreed to the request and in 1995 inaugurated the annual Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series. Utah State’s Special Collections and Archives is ideally suited as the host for the lecture series. The state’s land grant institution began collecting agricultural and economic records very early, but in the 1960s became a major depository for Mormonobilia. Utah is unique in that one religion dominated the historical evolution of the state. Leonard Arrington, accompanied by his wife Grace Fort, joined the USU faculty in 1946 and along with S. George Ellsworth, Joel Ricks, and Milton C. Abrams focused on gathering original Mormon diaries, journals, and letters for the library. Professional archivists were hired and the concept of “special collections” was born at Utah State University. In many ways, Leonard Arrington profited from this vision. Trained as an economist at the University of Carolina, Arrington became an economic historian of international repute. Each month, Arrington and Ellsworth met with Eugene Campbell and Wendell Rich and presented their ideas on specific historical topics. Arrington, a native of Twin Falls, Idaho, published Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints in 1958. Utilizing the available collections and always seeking additional material, Arrington and his associates made Utah State University their base as they embarked on numerous publishing and editorial ventures. viii Arrington Mormon History Lectures They helped organize both the Western History Association and the Mormon History Association. They followed the professional organizations with the creation of journals such as the Journal of Mormon History, Dialogue, and the Western Historical Quarterly. The Quarterly has been edited at Utah State University since its inception twenty-five years ago. Arrington and Ellsworth were the first editors. Their idea was to provide new alternatives and opportunities for young scholars of the West in general and the Mormon West in particular. Arrington began writing biographies and institutional histories during the 1960s. He fostered careers, encouraged students, and employed many as researchers. His studies of Charles C. Rich, William Spry, and David Eccles illustrate this phase of his endeavors. At the same time, he also finished histories of the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company and of Kennecott Copper. Arrington’s roles as researcher, writer, founder, editor , nourisher, and friend continued to blossom. His reward was an appointment as LDS church historian in 1973, a position he held for ten years. Simultaneously, Arrington assumed the newly created Lemuel Redd Chair of Western History at Brigham Young University. Arrington’s focus became exclusively Mormon history and he attempted to create an atmosphere of open professional research. The church allowed him to hire a number of historians to work on special projects and assignments. Mormon history flourished during his tenure as historian and his own career was enhanced by the publication of The Mormon Experience, co-authored with Davis Bitton, and American Moses: A Biography of Brigham Young. In 1981, Arrington and his staff moved to BYU full-time and established the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute of History. He continued to publish and mentor other prospective historians. Since retirement, he has published the monumental two-volume History of Idaho as well as numerous biographies of such western figures as Harold Silver and Charlie Redd. Widowed, he married Harriet Horne during this period and she became his travel companion as well as an active partner in his research and writings . They chose to deposit their vast collection of primary material as well as their library at Utah State University. Thus the Leonard J. Arrington Historical Archives in Special Collections and Archives was established. Leonard himself presented the first annual lecture on November 7, 1995 and in typical Arrington fashion emphasized people who made an ix Introduction intellectual difference in Mormon history. That lecture documented two of Arrington’s long held principles—(1) institutions, especially religious ones, should never fear their history and (2) understanding people is critical to the significance of institutions. Included in his...