Collected Leonard J Arrington Mormon History Lectures

2. 22 October 1996 Making Space for the Mormons

31 2 Making Space for the Mormons Richard Lyman Bushman The organizers of this event are to be commended for initiating a lecture series named for Leonard Arrington, and I truly hope I can do justice to the occasion. I am tempted to devote the time to Leonard himself, for though his immense talents are widely appreciated, we always feel they are not appreciated enough. I met Leonard in 1960 when I took my first job at BYU as a new Ph.D. To my surprise one day in the fall, an envelope from Utah State appeared in the mail, and in it was a letter from Leonard welcoming me to the community of scholars in Utah. How did he know about me and why had he written from Logan to Provo? I realized eventually that he took responsibility for the entire enterprise of Mormon and Great Basin history and wanted to encourage me in the good work. A little over a decade later he came into our lives again when he got wind of a group of Boston women’s plans to write a history of women in the Church. He was there immediately with encouragement, interest, and a little subsidy to help publish Mormon Sisters. He won the hearts of those women, and made Claudia Bushman, the ringleader and my wife, his friend for life. Leonard drew me into Mormon studies by proposing that I write the first volume of the projected sixteen-volume history of the Church. I had planned for years to work on Joseph Smith, but kept putting it off in favor of other projects. He persuaded me to take on the assignment and made it easy to work from Boston by sending photocopies of key documents. Later he edited and defended the work, and I dedicated Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism to Leonard because it is his book as well as mine. Scores of authors could tell similar stories, and “Map of the City of Nauvoo,” by Gustavus Hill. Courtesy of LDS Historical Department. 33 Making Space for the Mormons scores of books would not have been written without him. He is truly the patriarch of Mormon studies in our generation. Now I am returning to Joseph Smith at the suggestion of Ron Esplin, Leonard’s successor at the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute. The Institute’s staff saw the need for a biography that would both develop Joseph Smith’s religious thought and give more credence to his spiritual influence on his followers, and they asked me to take on the assignment. Although I am just starting the research and have little to report so far, I want to give you an idea of my general perspective. I am writing a cultural biography of Joseph Smith that will be akin to the studies of literary scholars who situate their texts, as they say, in the culture of a period. A cultural biography makes a greater effort than usual to relate the subject’s thought to the thinking in his larger environment. I would like to know where Joseph stood in relation to contemporary theologians , reformers, and preachers. How do his ideas of Israel, priesthood, Zion, temples, riches, history, and so forth compare to the ideas of his time? This approach may seem out of place for a believing Latter-day Saint like myself, because it sounds like the method of historicist scholars who want to explain away Joseph Smith’s revelations. People like John Brooke or Fawn Brodie search contemporary sources for references to Melchizedek or baptism for the dead or eternal marriage or Enoch to show that Joseph got his ideas from his environment and that Mormonism came about through natural historical processes rather than by divine intervention as Mormons believe. My method is similar, but my purposes are different. I want to reconstruct the world around Joseph Smith just as the historicists do, but in order to understand him, not to find historical sources for the revelations . How are we to see and appreciate this many-faceted man without putting him in context? We define ourselves by comparison to others who are the same or different, and people from the past are understood in the same way. On the principle that a fish is the last one to discover water, I think Mormons themselves will not accurately perceive Joseph Smith until he is situated in his...