The Birth and Life of the New Mormon History

Juanita Brooks (1898–1989) lived on a borderland. Raised in a small community near the invisible lines that divide the corners of Nevada and Arizona and Utah, she grew up fascinated with the order that the Mormon founders of her town had brought to the bright, dusty desert, turning it into "a quilt made of square blocks, with the cottonwood trees the stitching to hold them together."¹

She was quick-witted, and her interest in Mormonism's boundarymaking led her to the nearby comparative metropolis of St. George, Utah, where she taught at the church-funded Dixie Junior College; to Columbia University, where she received a master's degree in English in 1929; and to Salt Lake City, where she dug into the church's archives and grappled with its leadership over what she found there. Finally she traveled back south to her hot and beloved border country to write 1950's The Mountain Meadows Massacre, one of the most important pieces of scholarship on Mormonism ever produced.² The book is the story of a September 1857 tragedy, a day when Mormon settlers in southern Utah, haunted (so Brooks argued) by fears of an approaching United States army and consumed with suspicion of outsiders, murdered some 120 members of a migrant train traveling toward California.

Craig S. Smith, who has done us the service of editing 222 of Brooks' letters, observes that they document not only her wry, self-aware personality, but also her concerns and calling. Brooks, along with historian Leonard Arrington, biographer Fawn Brodie, and researcher Dale Morgan, inaugurated what scholars have often called the "New Mormon History," a cascade of publications on Mormon history and life that met for the first time the standards of research, documentation, and point of view expected in the modern academy. Crucially, Mormons themselves were its major authors; some, such as Brooks and Arrington, active Latter-day Saints. Others, such as Brodie and Morgan, had ceased involvement in the church by the time they set about writing its history. All, though, understood their work to be relevant to understanding not merely the past but also the present life of the church. This is why for editor Smith, the New Mormon History represents an important corrective to churchproduced hagiography. As he puts it, Brooks "graciously defended herself to those who disagreed with her and allowed them their views, though she always strongly advocated open and unbiased writing of Mormon history" (2). Brooks' letters, though, illustrate that the dichotomy between the old and the new, the traditional and the professional, is not so clean as the phrase "open and unbiased" might imply.

They also reveal a cohort with some unease about what it meant to be a Mormon intellectual. The church had long been isolated by choice and practice. Through the tradition of polygamy and conscious pursuit of economic and political separation, Mormons held the rest of America at arm's length. But by the time Brooks was born the church had abandoned polygamy, and Mormons like her were attending universities and taking jobs all over the country.³ Some felt torn between two worlds. Brooks' letters gossip about Maurine Whipple, whose successful 1941...