The Schroeder Mormon Collection at the Wisconsin State Historical Library

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Shortly before the turn of this century, a young criminal lawyer practicing in Salt Lake City, published on the back of one of his own pamphlets the following advertisement: “I want all books on the subject of Mormonism, of which I do not already own a copy.” His name was Theodore Albert Schroeder (1864-1953). 

Mr. Schroeder’s interest in Mormonism was sensational rather than pious, for, as an amateur psychoanalyst, he was deeply interested in religion as a manifestation of abnormal psychology and sexual urges. He wrote numerous articles such as “Christian Science and Sex,” “Converting Sex into Religiosity,” “Revivals, Sex and Holy Ghost,” and “Erotogenesis of Religion.” His interest in law and psychology also led him to produce a number of articles on the criminal mind. 

With Lincoln Steffens he became one of the most outspoken leaders of the Free Speech Movement, praised by Henry Miller for his “wholesome and enlightened viewpoint.” Schroeder’s many articles fostering free speech include “A Challenge to the Sex Censors,” “Blasphemy and Free Speech,” “Censors and Psychopaths,” “Censorship of Sex Literature,” and “Legal Obscenity and Sexual Psychology.” He also edited an anthology on free speech and collaborated with Havelock Ellis, the noted psychologist and sexologist, in writing “Witchcraft and Obscenity.” 

Schroeder seems to have been especially interested in what he saw as the erotic and sensational aspects of Mormonism, for his numerous writings on Mormonism, a number of which were published in a magazine entitled “Lucifer’s Lantern,” probe such topics as Joseph Smith as an abortionist (for which the Church unsuccessfully indicted him), “Mormonism and Prostitution,” and “Some Facts Concerning Polygamy.” He also challenged the authorship of the Book of Mormon and, under the name of “Juab, a high private in Israel,” wrote “The Gospel Concerning Church and State.” Schroeder served as the attorney against B. H. Roberts in the 1899 Congressional proceedings on Roberts’s eligibility and in 1903 wrote a pamphlet entitled “The Case of Senator Smoot.” 

Sponsored by these interests, Schroeder’s collection grew until it was coveted by Utah’s own universities. Schroeder, however, moved from Salt Lake City to the East, and looked elsewhere for a donee. On his death in 1953 he willed his entire collection to the Wisconsin State Historical Library at Madison, Wisconsin, the library which served his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin. 

At Wisconsin his library was grouped into two areas, Mormonism and pornography; the latter has not yet been catalogued. The large collection on Mormonism, however, is now essentially the entire Mormon collection at Wisconsin. And because the University has no divinity school, and because there are no Mormons in the history department, nor, apparently, any scholars actively concerned with Mormon Americana, there has been little demand for updating the already extensive collection. 

Standard Mormon history is a strong point in the Schroeder collection. Included are The Documentary History of the Church, Roberts’s Comprehensive History, Joseph Fielding Smith’s Essentials in Church History, Roberts’s The Missouri Persecutions, Outlines of Ecclesiastical History and The Rise and Fall of Nauvoo. Also included are John Henry Evans’s One Hundred Years of Mormonism, 1805-1905, Orson F. Whitney’s Popular History of Utah, George A. Smith’s The Rise, Progress and Trials of the Church . . . , Orson Pratt’s Exodus of Modern Israel, Parley P. Pratt’s Later Persecutions of the Church, and Oliver Cowdery’s Letters, on the Bringing in of the New Dispensation. 

There are also Mulder’s Among the Mormons, Alvin R. Dyer’s The Refiner’s Fire, Richard Vetterli’s Mormonism, Americanism, and Politics, and histories for young people by Skousen, Nephi Anderson, and others. More recent histories range from Julius C. Billiter’s Temple of Promise, Ray West’s Kingdom of the Saints, Joseph A. McRae’s Historical Facts Regarding the Liberty and Carthage fails, and Maurine Whipple’s This is the Place to O’Dea’s The Mormons, Whalen’s The Latter-day Saints in the Modern World, and Flanders’s Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi. Several works on legal history dealing with polygamy and the temple lot case are also available. 

Closely related to historical works are numerous Mormon biographies. Included are biographies of Joseph Smith by Preston Nibley, John Henry Evans, and John A. Widstoe, as well as Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History, Isaac Woodbridge Riley’s The Founder of Mormonism, A Psychiatric Study of Joseph Smith, Jr., and a number of the early portraits of the Prophet Joseph, such as “The Yankee Mahomet,” from the American Whig Review (1851), and Edward Wheelock Tullidge’s Life of Joseph Smith the Prophet. Other standard biographical works are Preston Nibley’s on Brigham Young, Tullidge’s Life of Brigham Young, and Milton R. Hunter’s Brigham Young, the Colonizer. Also included are Roberts’s Life of John Taylor, Claire Noall’s Intimate Disciple, A Portrait of Willard Richards, Orson F. Whitney’s Life of Heber C. Kimball, an Apostle, the Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt, Reva L. Scott’s A Biography of Parley P. Pratt, the Archer of Paradise, and other works on Joseph C. Rich, Franklin D. Richards, and Lorenzo Snow.

Juanita Brooks’s edition of Hosea Stout, On the Mormon Frontier, as well as biographies of Christopher Merkley, John R. Young, Lorenzo Dow Young, Reynolds Cahoon, Amasa M. Lyman, and Francis M. Lyman are included, as are several biographies of John D. Lee, Thomas L. Kane, Jacob Hamblin, David Whitmer and a number of minor Mormon historical figures. Also of interest are Preston Nibley’s Stalwarts of Mormonism, Jensen’s Latter-day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia, 1901-1936; and, of course, The Story of George Romney.

To assist the scholar in historical research, the library offers the B.Y.U. work, A Practical Bibliography of Works on Mormonism (1944), the 1887 catalogue of publications of the Church, Kirkpatrick’s Holdings of the University of Utah on Utah and the Church . . . (1954), the Catalogue of Books, Early Newspapers, and Pamphlets on Mormonism (1898), Dale Morgan’s 1950 bibliography, and Joseph Sudweek’s bibliography of “Discontinued LDS Periodicals” (1955). 

The Society’s holdings in periodicals pertaining to Mormons include The Deseret News (1851-1957), the Salt Lake Herald (1896-98), Living Issues (1897-1901), the Semi-Weekly Telegraph (1865-66), the Salt Lake Daily Telegraph (1864-68), the Weekly Territorial Business Directory for 1882, the Times (1883-84), the Tribune (1871- 89), the Semi-Weekly Tribune (1896-1923), and the Salt Lake Tribune (1924-43). 

Also important are collections of newspapers from Illinois and surrounding states published during the Nauvoo period. The library contains a number of Iowa and Wisconsin papers of the 1840’s. The Times and Seasons (1839-46) and the Nauvoo Expositor are included, as are such Illinois papers as the Galenian (Galena, 1834-36), the Galena Weekly Gazette (1834-78), and individual issues of other pertinent newspapers. 

Other Mormon periodicals represented are the General Conference Reports (from 1898 to the present), The Deseret Weekly (vols. 2-16), The Improvement Era (all volumes), The Millenial Star (nearly complete), The Juvenile Instructor (vols. 5-36), the Liahona (1908-1945), UEtoile du Deseret (1851-52), The Prophet (1845), The Olive Branch (1848), Sam Brannan’s Listen to the Voice of Truth (1844), Udgorn Seion {Trumpet of Zion—Welsh, 1849-57), and T. B. H. Stenhouse’s Le Reflecteur (Geneva, 1853). Besides numerous clippings and tear sheets on Mormonism, there are Tullidge’s Quarterly Magazine (1880-85); an interesting collection entitled “Early Notices of the Mormons, 1833-1838,” comprised of mounted newspaper clippings; and five boxes of pamphlets, including those of Theodore Schroeder. 

The Reorganized Church is represented by Inez Smith Davis’s The Story of the Church, by the official history of the Reorganized Church, written by President Joseph Smith and Apostle Heman C. Smith; and by the periodicals Autumn leaves (1888-1901, which later became the Saints’ Herald), and Vision, A Magazine for Youth (1888-1932). A few books of Reorganized Church apologia are likewise available. 

Publications on and by the Strangites are broad and important; several score of these works are kept in the library’s rare book collection and are counted among the collection’s most valuable holdings. The Strangite works include Oscar W. Riegel’s Crown of Glory, the Life of James J. Strang, Moses of the Mormons, George J. Adams’s A True History of the Rise of the Church . . . (1846), Correspondance of Bishop George Miller (1916), The Diamond (1848), and Strang’s Ancient and Modern Michilimackinae, including an Account of the Controversy between Mackinac and the Mormons (1854), and the Northern Islander (1850-56), the rare Strangite periodical.

The Whitmerite publication, The Return (vols. 1-7), the Annual Cyclopaedia, Church of the Messiah (1866), and the Utah Gospel Mission’s Little Encyclopedia of Mormonism (1927) represent other sects. 

The works on Mormon doctrine include a good portion of B. H. Roberts’s writings, The Mormon Doctrine of Diety, Mormonism—Its Origin and History, New Witness for God, The Gospel, and Defense of the Faith and the Saints; two works of P. P. Pratt, A Voice of Warning. . . and Key to Theology; John A. Widtsoe’s Seven Claims of the Book of Mormon, The Program of the Church, A Rational Theology; James E. Talmage’s The Vitality of Mormonism and the Articles of Faith; Cowley and Whitney on Doctrine; John Taylor’s Meditation and Atonement; and Joseph Fielding Smith’s Blood Atonement and the Origin of Plural Marriage. There is a notable sparsity of recent doctrinal works, which are limited to Adam S. Bennion’s What It Means to be a Mormon and Ezra Taft Benson’s So Shall Ye Reap. 

Standard topics of anti-Mormon interest are very well represented. The list of such books is endless, but a few titles should establish the point: Mormonism Against Itself, The Mormon Problem, The Mormon Menace, The Mormon Waterloo, Mormonism Exposed, The Mormon Delusion and Mormon Fanaticism Exposed. Works on the Mountain Meadows Massacre by Brooks, Carleton, Gibbs, Penrose, and Cannon, and works on polygamy by Froiseth, Hart, Pratt, Bennett, Musser, Shook, Ander son, Higgens, Bailey, Stenhouse, Tullidge, Wishard, and Kimball Young add to the generally lopsided nature of the collection. 

There are few scholarly works, either pro or con—which reflects reality. Charles A. Shook’s Cumorah Revisited is available, as is one work of Mormon apologia, Hugh Nibley’s Sounding Brass. There are also books on archaeology and the Book of Mormon, Nelson’s Scientific Aspects of Mormonism, Rigg’s A Skeptic Discovers Mormonism, Lowell Bennion’s Religion and the Pursuit of Truth, Dalton’s A Key to This Earth, and Sterling McMurrin’s Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion. 

These then are the major areas of the Schroeder collection on Mormonism, a significant collection for a non-Utah library. It is true that the collection is eclectic and haphazard, but because of the lack of suitable criteria, any collection on Mormonism must seem eclectic and haphazard. 

As was noted earlier, several factors help to account for this library’s failure to update and supplement the Schroeder collection. An additional factor confronts librarians everywhere: the superabundance of books by and about Mormons. According to B. H. Wilcox, head librarian at the Wisconsin State Historical Library, “Unless we have a demand for a specific book on the subject of Mormonism, we have no way of knowing which books are of more than average worth.” 

With the numerous works issued yearly by General Authorities, laymen, enemies, and scholars of Mormonism, librarians and acquisitions committees must either throw up their hands or find some simple rule of thumb upon which they can make a selection. They receive little help from the Church, whose publications on Church literature tend to praise indiscriminately everything written by active Church members, sometimes implying special value in the book according to the Church position of its author. This practice recalls Moliere’s observation: “Esteem must be founded on some sort of preference. Bestow it on everybody and it ceases to have any meaning at all.” 

This failure on the part of Church reviewers to discriminate between the good, better, and best for fear of censure; this failure to judge a book on its own merit, to praise genius and eloquence, and to damn paucity of thought and carelessness of style, undermines rather than benefits the Church by keeping writing of real worth from benefiting the members and attracting the world. 

Theodore Schroeder chose his books on the basis of what was available to him. On that basis his collection deserves recognition as an important collection on Mormonism. And as long as availability remains the best guide for building a Mormon collection, criticism of the Schroeder collection or any similar collection on Mormonism will be meaningless.