History of Historians | Davis Bitton and Leonard Arrington, Mormons and Their Historians

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That such a volume as this could be written at all is happy testimony to the development of a Mormon historiographical tradition. Its appearance at this late date, however—over a century and a half after the Church’s foundation—is less happy evidence of just how slowly that tradition has matured. The rise of a scientific, objective Mormon historiography began, according to the authors, barely thirty years ago, and there are still fewer outstanding practitioners of that craft than one would like to see, though clearly the field is thriving both numerically and intellectually. 

It is thriving so well, in fact, that few readers are going to be satisfied with this brief and shallow sketch of the bold con tours of the Mormon historiographical tradition, welcome as it is. These two senior scholars simply present too few historians and works, too little sustained analysis, too little comparison with intellectual currents outside of Mormondom, and too few recommendations for fruitful new directions for this study to stand as anything but the barest of introductions. 

The book has its undeniable strengths. Those of us who daily ply the trade routes of Mormon literature generally know something of Edward Tullidge through the articles of Ronald W. Walker on the Godbe circle and B. H. Roberts through Davis Bitton’s studies. But what do most of us know of Orson Whitney, to whose fat volumes we keep turning, or Andrew Love Neff, or even that awe-inspiring engine of compilation Andrew Jenson, unless we have taken the time to trudge through his lengthy autobiography? The thumbnail sketches of the lives and works of these men, as well as of Willard Richards and George A. Smith, are most welcome and will enable us to use those older histories with enhanced understanding and enjoyment. 

In a sense, though, the biographical chapters through the one on B. H. Roberts, which comprise roughly the first half of the volume, are the least satisfying ones. Bitton and Arrington chide some of the early historians, in their concern to promote the theological and historical uniqueness of the Church, for their inability to recognize that anything other than the golden plates and Joseph Smith’s revelations could have fashioned Mormonism. But the authors themselves have failed generally to examine intellectual currents outside of Mormonism that may have influenced its historiography. 

Those early historians were clearly working within a Victorian aesthetic tradition heavily seasoned with Byronic romanticism, nationalism, and extravagant oratorical rhetoric, none of which were by any means unique to Mormonism. Yet Bitton and Arrington give us only the barest passing mention of such ideas with the exception of their discussion of Tullidge’s Mormon nationalism. Many early Saints, including some of the historians, lacked ex tensive formal education. Newly appointed Church historians could not be expected to begin their tenures with remedial reading in George (or even Hubert Howe) Ban croft, Parkman, Prescott, or other prominent historians of their day. There was, nevertheless, an intellectual climate which they shared with those historians, and the authors of this study owe us an account of that climate. 

If, as it seems clear, Mormon historiography turned an important corner in the 1940s, then surely Bitton and Arrington slight the agents of that reorientation, Ber nard DeVoto, Fawn Brodie, Dale Morgan, and Juanita Brooks. In the perfunctory paragraphs on each in an omnibus chapter they are lumped together under the accurate but superficial principle that none possessed academic degrees in history. (Those four, in fact, succeeded so embarrassingly well at the historian’s craft that we Ph.D.s might well pass over, rather than emphasize, their lack of credentials.) 

The authors’ hasty sketches of Brodie and Morgan are particularly inadequate. They damn Brodie with faint praise as a good storyteller but a faulty researcher, while failing to discuss extensively Morgan’s history of the Latter-day Saints because it was left unfinished at his death. One wonders, though, since Morgan’s history was completed at least in draft form to 1830 and since his appraisal of Joseph Smith and his account of the writing of the Book of Mormon differ in few if any significant ways from Brodie’s, does Morgan the researcher vindicate Brodie the storyteller? This and similar questions await fuller study. 

The book’s discussion of Mormon historiography since Arrington took over as Church historian in 1972 is generally adequate, though many will wonder why some figures are not discussed and others only briefly, particularly Arrington himself, surely a colossus of the field. Their account of the dismantling in 1982 of what Bitton has called the “Camelot” of the Church historian’s office under Arrington is gentle—even to the point of whitewashing. Many regard that action as a banishment concomitant with the dramatically restricted access to the Church archives. Rather than offering suggestions for future historiographical development, the authors conclude with a plea, well taken but too gently urged, for the reopening of the Church archives as the necessary prerequisite for future historiographical development. 

Finally, the editors at the University of Utah Press have served Bitton and Arrington poorly. They allow such sentences as “Reaching more people was his narrative history” (p. 76) to stand, this example occurring, incredibly, at the beginning of the authors’ account of B. H. Roberts’s grammatical and stylistic lapses. And far too much yuppified jargon pollutes these pages, including phrases I doubt Bitton and Arrington employ in informal discourse, let alone in scholarly exposition. They are, for example, “up front” in their acknowledgments; they point out that Orson Whitney was a “people person,” that B. H. Roberts in a period of youthful dissolution almost went “down the tube” as a Church member, and that Bitton’s Guide to Mormon Diaries and Autobiographies gives the “nitty-gritty” of Mormon history. One is thus surprised that the final chapter contains no “bottom line” on Mormon historiography. Such expressions, even when placed within quotation marks, do little credit to the literary excellence previously established by these scholars. 

Mormons and Their Historians by Davis Bitton and Leonard Arrington (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 213 pp., $20.00.