I want to continue discussing the issue of prophets and administrators by giving a quick overview of some observations of the church’s first three presidents, and will talk about later presidents in future posts.

Richard Bushman claimed in Rough Stone Rolling, “The characterization of Joseph Smith as the prophet with no gift for administration, whose inchoate movement was saved by the genius of Brigham Young, misses the mark. Joseph did not attend to details the way Young did, by he could certainly organize” (251). Bushman doesn’t cite who he was disagreeing with, but the sounds a little straw-man-y to me, and I wonder if anyone put it quite as strongly as he claimed to refute (not sure).

But having studied this issue at length, I’d say that even acknowledging the difference in the attention to administrative detail, Bushman overstated JS’s interest in administration. Simply put, in my observation, particularly in the early years, JS found administration kind of cumbersome and tedious. The off-quoted phrase John Taylor attributed to Smith I think is actually a hope Smith had: “I teach them correct principles and they govern themselves.” Smith probably wanted that policy to work, but it didn’t work very well.

In the beginning, Oliver Cowdery seemed to assert stucture to the church with his “Articles of the Church of Christ,” and likely played an important role in drafting DC 20 (v.16). [1]

By the time of Nauvoo, Smith did take on a more consistent administrative role, but still liked to hand things off to others. For instance, he put the twelve over everything outside of Nauvoo, and since there were actually more Mormons outside of Nauvoo then inside, that meant Brigham had leadership over more of the members then Smith did.

Young played important administrative roles during Smith’s presidency and showed real acumen when he took over. To repeat, he often declared himself not a prophet, but did assert his authority as leader of the church.

An interesting thing that Young did was to appoint a bunch of his sons as apostles in an attempt to get them in line for succession. Young went so far as to appoint John Willard Young an apostle when he was only 11, and later made 5 other sons apostles all without informing anyone else at the time. John  Willard was not very interested in being in the hierarchy and was removed after his father’s death, but would have succeeded Lorenzo Snow if his 11-year-old apostles appointment had been retained. Brigham Jr. was also ahead of Joseph F. Smith and active in the quorum, but the First Presidency under Snow reworked the seniority to move Brigham Jr. back, and placed Joseph F. Smith ahead of him. [2]

Young was not the last church president to appoint his sons as apostles.

Quinn argues succession still not very clear at the time of Young’s death and not very certain about Taylor. Young didn’t seem to like him and had laid into him not long before Young’s death. The leaders didn’t reconstitute the FP for a few years because bother by how autocratic Young had been and wanted Taylor to treat the twelve as a body equal in authority like the scripture said. Eventually reconstituted, but felt that Taylor didn’t treat them as equal either and came to a head again in the next presidency, my next post. (Quinn, Mormon Hierarchy, 40-41).

John Taylor recorded many revelations (I heard more than any president other than Jospeh Smith, but let me know if that’s right or not). Two were published but none of them were canonized. As many commentors noted this summer, one of his revelations has long been considered highly problematic.

Thus among Smith’s two first successors was a leader who often declared himself not a prophet though the membership often declared that he was, followed by a leader who did give many revelations none of which were canonized, and one of the revelations the church not long after his death wished he had not given.

Both Young and Taylor appointed their sons as apostles for succession purposes, with John Willard later being removed and Brigham Jr. being demoted, and John W. Taylor, who promoted his father’s controversial revelations and was excommunicated for his continued practice of polygamy. Young and Taylor had some messiness in their prophet roles.

Some of these issues will crop up again that I’ll note in future posts. My point isn’t to attack Young or Taylor, but as I said in the first post, I do see a caretaker model fitting better, and am grateful for the efforts Young and Taylor made at working hard a leading the church while they were president.

---

1. Scott H. Faulring, “An Examination of the 1829 ‘Articles of the Church of Christ’ in Relation to Section 20 of the Doctrine and Covenants,” BYU Studies 43, no. 4 (2004): 57–91. My thanks to Don Bradley for sharing his thoughts with me on this topic.
2. Todd Compton, “John Willard Young, Brigham Young, and the Development of Presidential Succession in the LDS Church,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 35 no. 4, (2002): 111–34.