The “New Mormon History” was an era when Latter-day Saint historians began to rely on the techniques of modern academic and professional historians in their approach to research and writing about the Church. Leonard J. Arrington is, in many ways, the face of this movement and was given the moniker of “the Father of Mormon History” as a result. What is sometimes overlooked, however, was that the people doing “New Mormon History” built on the shoulders of a circle of earlier historians. A central figure in that group was Dale L. Morgan. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, biographer Richard Saunders discussed the life and legacy of Dale L. Morgan. What follows here is a copost to the full interview.
First off, Richard Saunders described who Dale Morgan was and why he was significant:
Morgan was a mid-century historian of Western America and the Latter Day Saints. He started but never completed a history called The Mormons in the 1940s. Morgan was the one Leonard Arrington came to for criticism and support early in his career, and he was the one who made Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History and Juanita Brooks’ Mountain Meadows Massacre relevant works of actual history.
Unintentionally he was the central figure tying together “Mormondom’s Lost Generation” writers, historians and novelists who moved Latter-day Saints into the American mainstream during the 1930s and 1940s, before the academically driven “New Mormon History” became a thing.
The term “New Mormon History,” Saunders explained, was
coined by ethnic historian Moses Rischin in 1969. He saw the flowering of academic interest in the Latter Day Saints as a meaningful departure from the old nineteenth century polemics. Rischin identified Thomas F. O’Dea’s The Mormons (1957) as the departure point. Rischin’s piece was only a one-page essay, but it had a huge impact on the field.
I think his view is useful, but misses the much more significant departure that had happened two decades earlier with Nels Anderson, Dale Morgan, and their circle of non-academic writers. This earlier generation had been the one for whom the search for contemporary documentation became a mission. Academic historians benefitted from not only their professional training, but particularly from that earlier spadework. …
I think a good argument could be made that Morgan was inadvertently the initial published representation of that broad change. His 1940 work The State of Deseret seems to be the first study on the Latter-day Saints that reflects modern standards for documentation and scholarly approach. There are earlier works by academics, but they tend to reflect scholarship of their times, being highly interpretive and less well documented, mostly rehashing published matter. Notice Morgan’s monograph appears 17 years prior to O’Dea’s book and nearly two decades before Arrington’s Great Basin Kingdom.
“New Mormon History” was an important movement, but it benefitted from the work of Dale Morgan and his associates.
Dale Morgan’s influence extended beyond the works about the western United States and the fur trade that he published. As Saunders put it, “Morgan’s real contribution to history was as a mentor, sign post, and sounding board. That is harder to trace because he trained no graduate students and had no advanced degree at a time when history was professionalizing. Plus, it was becoming much harder for non-academics to find a voice.” For example, he mentored Fawn Brodie in her production of a biography about Joseph Smith (No Man Knows My History) and Juanita Brooks in her important work on the Mountain Meadows Massacre:
Fawn Brodie won the Knopf prize for biography in 1942, which launched her Joseph Smith biography project. She approached Morgan while both were living in Washington DC and he immediately became a major source for her notes. He read and critiqued the manuscript twice before publication and helped her turn her approach and writing from polemic into a serious work of history. No matter what one may think about the book or author personally, No Man remains the most significant Latter-day Saint book of the twentieth century.
Morgan almost single-handedly made Juanita Brooks’ Mountain Meadows Massacre. Brooks decided she wanted to write about the massacre in 1937, and told Morgan so by 1941, but she imagined the story as an article in Harper’s like her earlier “The Water’s In.” Morgan convinced her that it had to be a real book, had to be told factually, and had to be documented.
In fact, Mountain Meadows Massacre is the only one of her works with substantive footnotes, and none of the citations to federal sources or contemporary newspapers came from her own research. Probably half or more of the book’s cited sources were supplied by Dale Morgan, not her.
Morgan also insisted the publisher of Mountain Meadows Massacre had to be reputable enough to withstand pressure from the church. He was the one that suggested and approached Stanford through Wally Stegner. As he lay dying from cancer twenty years later, Brooks wrote him “I myself owe so much to your guidance, though I can hardly claim to be an historian. You were right when you said my area is folklore.”
While the historians he helped were not always friendly to the Church (Morgan himself was not), the emphasis on returning to the original sources that Morgan championed elevated these histories and provided some of the impetus for the development of the “New Mormon History.”
For more on Dale L. Morgan, head on over to read the full interview with Richard L. Saunders at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk. While you’re there, check out the Brigham Young Quotes page and my latest piece on Zera Pulsipher.
Chad, how much do you think that New Mormon History has affected the rank and file members? In my own Sunday School classes in the past, I have used information from Rough Stone Rolling and Dialogue in class (without disclosing that’s where it came from) and it generated so interesting discussion, but do you think that your average Latter-day Saint has even a marginally better grip on Church history than their parents and grandparents did? To make it easier assume that that Latter-day Saint is 45 years old and so was born about 1979. They are old enough to remember a world largely without Internet and probably had a copy of Our Heritage as a very poor introduction to Church History in addition to whatever they learned in Seminary and Institute.
I would argue that the effect has been fairly marginal for the active and then mostly because they have friends or relatives they know who have problems with or have left because of it. Most Latter-day Saints haven’t the foggiest idea who Leonard Arrington was or have ever heard of No Man Knows My History. They probably heard something about seer stones and would flatly acknowledge that Joseph Smith had multiple wives if only because they skimmed that part of Saints volume I, but it’s a crap shoot as to whether they know anything about Mountain Meadows or much of anything about 19th century Mormonism after 1847.
It’s hard to say without actual data.
I will note that publishing Mormon-related literature has an outsized market compared to membership, which indicates that there is an abiding interest in studying Mormon History. Books like Rough Stone Rolling, Emma Hale Smith: Mormon Enigma, and David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism are widely read enough that they have had an impact on the general thought trends in the Church, even among those who haven’t read them. At the same time, I have also observed that a majority of members aren’t deeply aware of our history through their own research.
The New Mormon History laid the foundation for the Church to tell its own story more accurately and clearly, as can be seen with the Joseph Smith Papers project, Church Historian’s Press publications, Revelations in Context, and Saints. These are all relatively new resources, however, and will take time to have a deep impact. They will likely have the most immediate impact on folks who serve missions as some of the small amount of available official literature to study. If we get to the point that they have more of an impact on Church manuals like “Come, Follow Me” or the Institute manuals, we will likely see more awareness as well. The reliance of scholars on the historical works in the vein of New Mormon History in podcasts and other media that members are listening to is also an arena where members are being introduced to it. (As a humous aside, at my last stake conference, almost every speaker talked about how much they loved listening to podcasts that relate to the “Come, Follow Me” course of study – enough so that the stake president told members that they shouldn’t be so reliant on podcasts over studying the scriptures directly.)
Another aspect that complicates things is that the Church has expanded beyond the Anglophone world, but the academic literature of Mormonism has not. I.e., relatively little scholarship on Mormonism is published in languages other than English. So, if we’re looking at the average member today, they are less likely to have an awareness of New Mormon History because there just isn’t literature available in the languages that a majority of the Church speaks beyond Church publications like Saints and At the Pulpit, which the Church has footed the bill to translate.
And a final piece of the picture is survivor effect. In my experience, the people who are most aware of Church history also tend to be among the most likely to leave the Church these days. As a result, the average active member in the pews is more likely to be someone who isn’t deeply familiar with the literature of the New Mormon History. The atrophy of members due to historical issues is probably the biggest impact of academic studies of Mormon history, though the methods of the New Mormon History of balancing faith and academics has probably helped to slow the atrophy overall rather than leaving the history to books that are openly antagonistic to the Church, like No Man Knows My History.
So, you’re probably right in general, though I think it has had a bigger effect overall on the Church than we probably see in our general Church meetings.