One Family? Race and Mormonism in John Turner’s “Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet”

Today I?m flying west, from Boston to Chicago, for the American Academy of Religion?s annual conference. Depending on how the plane banks west, we might fly directly over Lowell, Massachusetts, the onetime home of Walker Lewis, a black Mormon whom Brigham Young once described as ?one of the [Mormons?] best Elders, an African.?

The timing of this indirect mention of the black Mormon convert?Spring of 1847?is important. Young and most of the leaders of the Latter-day Saints in exile and exodus?passing the winter of 1846-47 in Winter Quarters?were debating the place of black men, or at least a black man, in their community. William McCary, the ?Nigger Prophet,? as some of the Mormons leaders called him, was causing quite a stir in camp.

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The Mormon Reformation in Turner’s Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet

The Mormon Reformation is a period in LDS History that has long been of interest to scholars working in the field. Paul Peterson, Leonard Arrington, Thomas Alexander, D. Michael Quinn, Will Bagley, Paul Peterson, and others have all written about the reformation and have grappled with its cause(s) and meaning(s). In the interest of full disclosure, a chapter from my recent book Shakers, Mormons and Religious Worlds (Indiana University Press 2011) also addresses the subject of the Mormon reformation. John Turner takes a turn as well in his new biography of Brigham Young. Turner’s material on the reformation represents a fine synthesis of some of the most recent work on the subject, and as such it has value beyond the descriptive function.

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“Either a misogynist or proto-feminist”: Women and Polygamy in John Turner’s “Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet”

[Another installment in the roundtable on John Turner’s Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet.]

Amanda's Aunt Ann Eliza, also known as Wife No. 19 and now a star of a major Lifetime Movie

I should mention at the outset of this review that I am not a dispassionate, objective observer when it comes to the subject of Brigham Young and polygamy.  In other words, I have a dog in the fight.  As a child, my grandmother regaled me of stories of my Uncle Ed?s great grandmother who had divorced Brigham Young and then went on a lecture tour revealing his hypocrisy and tyrannical abuse of his wives.  When I was older, I realized that the woman that my grandmother had taken such pride was none other than Ann Eliza Young, the famous nineteenth wife of Brigham Young.  The fact that my great uncle?s last name was Webb confirmed the ancestral tie.  My adulthood, however, also tempered my feelings about Brigham Young, which had ranged from bemusement at his ideas about Adam-God to disgust at the number of his wives.  Although I still joked about what I would like to say to the Mormon prophet if we ever met in the afterlife, I also began realized that he was a man who had loved his children deeply and had experienced a great deal of pain and suffering during his time as a missionary and as a man in Nauvoo.  I still remember reading about the aid that he rendered to his daughter Susa after she found herself unable to support herself after divorcing her alcoholic first husband.

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Review: Brigham Young and the Expansion of the Mormon Faith

Juvenile Instructor is grateful for a JI-emeritus writer, Brett Dowdle, for writing this review! Dr. Dowdle is a historian for the Joseph Smith Papers Project and holds a Ph.D. in American History from Texas Christian University.

Review, Thomas G. Alexander, Brigham Young and the Expansion of the Mormon Faith (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019).

            Despite its immense popularity, few genres of historical writing are more complex than that of biography. Those figures who tend to merit the kind of biographies that will be widely read generally carry with them a host of popular perceptions and myths that either border on demonization or hagiographic adoration. In most cases, the best biographies must ultimately find someplace in the muddy middle, displaying the complexity and humanity of the subject. Thomas Alexander’s recent biography of Brigham Young does an admirable job of finding just such a place for the controversial leader. The result is a highly readable and fast-paced biography that is approachable to both trained historians and the interested public.

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Book Review: Turner, The Mormon Jesus: A Biography

John G. Turner, The Mormon Jesus: A Biography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.

John Turner?s new book about Mormons resembles his previous in some ways. There, as here, he tilts a familiar subject like a prism, slightly on an angle, and in so doing casts light on areas of Mormonism previously neglected. Turner?s book about Brigham Young probed deeply into the private life of the figure normally described as Mormonism?s great organizer and administrator, and so we came to know more about the slow formalization of polygamy, and the hectic landscapes of early Mormon religiosity, and the traumatic, rough and violent nineteenth century American frontier.

Here, in The Mormon Jesus, Turner delves into a topic as similarly contentious and argued over (though mostly among practitioners rather than students of American religion) as Brigham Young: Mormonism?s ideas about Jesus. 

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Guest Post: Jeff Turner, “Spring Musicals: Weirdness, Accuracy, and Introductions”

[We are thrilled to have yet another guest post from Jeff Turner, a PhD student at the University of Utah. See his previous offerings here, here, and here.]

?I actually learned something about Mormonism,? said my seat-neighbor at the Book of Mormon musical this past spring. Terrified, curious, and excited, I found myself wondering what he could have learned from the musical that he hadn?t known beforehand. So I asked. Surprisingly, his new piece of information had to do with the relationship between Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, namely that they knew each other in person, which made Young?s succession as the next church president more approachable to my seatmate (even though the succession was oversimplified in the musical). Well that?s not so bad, I thought, and I can see how he picked that up from the musical. We had a short chat about it afterward, and that was the end of it.

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Pioneer Prophet Roundtable: Turner Responds

John Turner wraps up the JI’s roundtable discussion of Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet.

Four-and-a-half years ago, during my initial research trip to Utah, I ventured down to Provo and had lunch with Spencer Fluhman and several of his students. Among them were David Grua and Chris Jones (and Stan Thayne, I think). The Juvenile Instructor was a newborn blog at the time. So it’s a bit surreal for me to have read the topical reviews of Pioneer Prophet over the past six weeks at this blog.

I love the field of Mormon history for many reasons. The rich sources. The voluminous scholarship. Most of all, I love the fact that so many people care about the Mormon past. This has some downsides. It makes the field contentious and testy. One need only read the “letters” section of the most recent Journal of Mormon History. Such contention, however, is more than outbalanced by the passion that so many individuals bring to their writing and to conversations about  Mormon history. That passion is contagious.

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Brigham Young and the Creation of Mormon Doctrine

Another in the JI’s series of review essays on various aspects of John G. Turner’s Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet

One of the more common tropes in Mormon history is drawing the comparison between Joseph Smith the visionary dreamer and Brigham Young the hard-headed administrator. This is sometimes done with admiration or scholarly satisfaction ? faithful Mormons might say that Brigham was precisely what the church needed when Joseph Smith?s assassination left the Mormons dazed and splintering, and sociologists of religion often describe the transition from Joseph Smith?s leadership to Brigham Young?s as a classic case of Weberian routinization of charisma. The dichotomy is also sometimes drawn with a sense of tragedy: many liberal-leaning Mormons imagine Joseph Smith?s Mormonism as a time of exciting intellectual freedom and theological experimentation, and see in Brigham Young the slow settling in of dull institutional authoritarianism and the end of Joseph?s enthusiastic humanism.

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The Mountain Meadows Massacre in Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet

Brigham Young ?has never been less than the tyrant of the Mormon church, and if there does not cleave his soul today the deadly crime of wholesale murder in the massacre of Mountain Meadow, there will be forever, probably, cleave to his name the guilt of that awful slaughter, in the conviction of the American people, who would have indulged in no reprehensible joy, if he had been brought to the bar of human justice for that and the involved iniquities that defame his memory and disgrace his name.?[1]

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Mormon-Indian Relations in Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet

John Turner assumed a tall task when he decided to write a biography of Brigham Young, a larger than life personality who, after Joseph Smith, was the defining figure in nineteenth-century Mormonism. Young was a key participant in the church’s founding years and was the driving force behind the Mormon settlement of the Great Basin. As Amanda noted in her contribution to this roundtable, the sheer scope of Young’s life required Turner to not only familiarize himself with a mountain of primary sources, but also the extensive and growing secondary literature on various facets of the second Mormon prophet’s life and environment. She also fairly notes that no biographer (except, perhaps, Richard Bushman) can be reasonably expected to competently cover all parts of a subject’s life equally, which will doubtless leave some readers disappointed. Brigham Young’s engagement with and impact on the Natives of the Great Basin was one area that Turner sought to contextualize within a broader secondary literature and, for the most part, he was highly successful.

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