Malcolm X and Mormon Studies: A short review and some reflections on comparative religion

I was pleased to learn this week that the late Manning Marable’s exhaustive biography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize in History. Thoroughly and thoughtfully revisionist, Marable’s account of Malcolm X’s life challenges much of what is presented in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a now classic piece of 20th century American literature that has popularized a particular view of the Nation of Islam minister and his role in the Civil Rights, Black Muslim, and Pan-African movements. Deconstructing the Autobiography (which was published posthumously and, as Marable highlights, heavily edited by “co-author” Alex Haley), Marable then reconstructs the life of the man born Malcolm Little, utilizing a wealth of primary sources, including letters, diaries, interviews, and even FBI files. It is a fascinating biography and well worth the read for anyone interested in the life of this controversial figure.

It also provides a captivating account of the Nation of Islam’s rise in mid-20th century America. The NOI—a somewhat militant Black Nationalist sect that emerged in Great Depression-era Detroit and Chicago—was founded by the mysterious Wallace D. Fard but grew to national prominence under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad in the mid 20th century, when Malcolm Little converted and quickly rose to prominence as a talented preacher and recruiter. Later, Malcolm grew disillusioned with Muhammad’s leadership and left the NOI. His inability to leave it alone, though, ultimately led to his assassination in February 1965 at the hands of NOI henchmen.

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Review: Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism

Givens, Terryl L. and Matthew J. Grow. Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

In 1854, Parley P. Pratt, Mormon apostle, theologian, polygamist, and apologist, set out to write his autobiography. In a letter to church historian George Smith, he explained that it was intended to be “a Lean, megre sketch of Church History. As my hurried life, and hurried manner of writing, prevents my branching out on many interesting items” (as quoted on p. 348). As anyone who has read Pratt’s autobiography—published posthumously by his son in 1874—can testify, it goes far beyond the “Lean, megre sketch” he apparently set out to write, and has served as both a ready resource for historians of 19th century Mormonism and a beloved book to thousands and thousands of lay Latter-day Saints to the present day. But Pratt was certainly right in noting that the Autobiography left out “many interesting items.” In Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism, accomplished scholars Terryl Givens and Matthew Grow set out to investigate those “many interesting items”—including many episodes that Pratt would likely never have discussed in detail even if he had the time and space to do so.

What struck me most forcefully while reading Givens and Grow’s book was Parley Pratt’s personality. Described by the authors as having a “tempestuous character,” Pratt comes across

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“Mormon” Dissent: Gestures to the Past and my own Mormon Story

Update on “The Mormon Body Project:”  I found skinny jeans.  Anyone who wants pictures can visit: http://scholaristas.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/the-skinny-on-the-hunt-for-skinny-jeans/

Last week, I attended a presentation at Benchmark Books by Will Bagley, Polly Aird, and Jeff Nichols on their new book Playing with Shadows: Voices of Dissent in the Mormon West.  They regaled the audience with stories of Ann Godge, a wife of John D. Lee who claimed that the Danites lived on top of caves and were willing to kill their own sons for infractions, Brigham Young Hampton, who tried to entrap several of Utah?s Gentile government officials in a prostitution ring and was instead arrested for running a brothel, and Charles Derry who could not bear the Mormon Reformation and was marginalized within his community.

As they were speaking I began to reflect on the stakes might be in labeling such people as Mormon dissenters.  Although these men and women had all once belonged to the Mormon faith, many of them had renounced Mormonism and considered themselves to exist in opposition to the church.  On the one hand, classifying them as Mormon dissidents seems to be a political statement that forces historians of the Mormon religious tradition to take voices of dissent seriously and to recognize them as belonging to the same history as men like Brigham Young and Joseph Fielding Smith.  One of the claims that Bagley, Aird, and Nichols made that night was that historians need to recognize the difficulties that everyday Mormons encountered as they tried to apply the principles of their faith to their lives.  While some people struggled through and remained within the faith, others decided to leave or to become figures of opposition.  Bagley, Aird, and Nichols want us to recognize that both options were valid.  On the other hand, to call someone like Godge Mormon does violence to the way that she saw herself.  Godge would have rejected the description and vehemently denied that it remained a part of her identity even after she had denounced the faith.  As historians, we need to think about the implications and politics of choosing certain descriptors for the people whose lives we are choosing to tell.

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Joseph Smith’s Politics, part 2

 Continued from part 1

The Saints soon shifted the focus of their attention to government at the state level. Acting on perceived signals from the governor’s office of his willingness to provide them with a militia escort to reoccupy their lands–but not to protect them once there–Joseph Smith raised a security force. In the summer of 1834, over two hundred Mormon men gathered from Kirtland and other eastern congregations to march to Missouri. However, news of the Mormon army reached Missouri before the army itself. Seized with war hysteria, the Jackson citizenry prepared to hold the county or die fighting. Smith aborted the venture when his army reached Zion’s exiles in neighboring Clay County and learned that state support for the reoccupation had evaporated. Several months later, however, the state legislature found a new solution to the “Mormon problem” in the creation of Caldwell County. It was commonly understood that Caldwell had been set aside for Mormon settlement.

New conflict erupted in 1838 when the Mormons settlers filled Caldwell and began spilling into neighboring counties. When vigilante activity began in Daviess County, the Saints called on Governor Lilburn Boggs to protect them. Boggs dispatched state militia, which disbanded and dispersed the vigilantes. When vigilantes attacked in Carroll County, the Saints’ appeals for help were denied and they had to abandon their colony there. Then vigilante activity resumed in Daviess County, and the Saints decided they would have to defend themselves. In response to a preemptive strike they made in Daviess and another engagement on the border between Caldwell and Ray counties, Governor Boggs declared the Mormons enemies of the state and ordered the state militia to drive them out of Missouri. Clearly the Saints had satisfied the injunction in the redemption revelation to weary the governor.

From the dungeon of a Missouri jailhouse, Joseph Smith wrote to the Saints–who had resettled in Illinois and Iowa–and instructed them to begin counting the costs of the Missouri expulsion in lands lost and confiscated chattel property. Using the language of the revelation on Zion’s redemption, he informed the Saints it was now time to focus their efforts on the national level. After escaping from his guards and rejoining the Saints, Smith gathered up all the documentation he could and took it to the nation’s capital to present to President Martin Van Buren and the 26th congress. He hoped that the federal government would intervene to restore the Saints to their land or remunerate them for their losses. In December 1839, when Smith arrived in the city, he called on the President at the White House. Upon hearing his case, Van Buren reportedly replied, “what can I do” I can do nothing for you,”if I do anything, I shall come in contact with the whole State of Missouri.” Following Constitutional interpretation–and especially as a states’ rights Democrat–Van Buren was unwilling to interfere in Missouri’s domestic affairs. But Smith viewed his reaction in a campaign context as well. In another version of the incident, Van Buren was reported to have said, “your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you . . . If I take up for you I shall lose the vote of Missouri.”

While Van Buren’s unwillingness to help the Saints almost closed the door on the presidential stage of appeal outlined in the redemption revelation, the context of the impending election opened the door wide again–for if Van Buren would not help them perhaps William Henry Harrison and the Whigs would. As the party of moral activism, the Whigs were more likely to interfere in domestic matters. With their Democratic patronage uncompensated, the Saints shifted their allegiance to the Whig party and voted for Harrison. Although Van Buren took both Missouri and Illinois, he did not retake the White House. But then neither did Harrison, except for a few weeks of terminal illness. Smith–unsatisfied with the “pseudo whig democrat reign” of John Tyler–waited for the next election. In the meantime, ongoing immigration made the Saints a demographic force to be reckoned with in Illinois. They became deeply involved in politics at the county and state levels. From the state legislature, they obtained a charter for their city Nauvoo granting broad powers of political autonomy. The new city council quickly passed a law protecting religious freedom for Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims. Smith soon became the mayor.

As the 1844 election approached, Smith and other leaders sent letters asking the various candidates what they would do for the Mormon people if elected. Those who responded offered no assurance of help. The purpose of the inquiry was to find the candidate most likely to do something about their redress petitions, but the responses they received ruled out the viability of support even before the election. However, the Saints had not exhausted all of their options in pursuing the divine mandate to appeal to the national executive; if none of the candidates in the field were willing to take up their cause, the Saints could field their own candidate. Joseph Smith prepared to run for president himself. Once an alienated separatist, he had become a petitioner to the government and then a candidate for its highest office. His immediate sights were now set on Washington, not New Jerusalem. The campaign was another huge step for the Saints toward participation in American political culture. Smith converted his entire missionary force into campaign workers and sent his chief lieutenants into the field to manage their efforts. Reaching out to Catholics and other minorities, he attempted to build a “coalition of the oppressed.” Drawn into public dialogue, Smith constructed a platform that weighed in on contemporary issues ranging from banking and commerce to the question of Texas annexation.

Smith’s platform centered, however, on civil rights and the federal protection they deserved. Though with the interests of his own people foremost in his mind, he focused his critique on slavery and the American prison system–advocating universal emancipation from both. In politics, as in religion, Smith’s views were far from orthodox. Smith’s political thought derived not from a deep study of classical theory but from his idiosyncratic religious worldview and from the existential experience of oppression. Smith knew firsthand the dark side of democracy and the dilemma it posed for American public life. Beyond serving as a Moses to his own people, Smith now offered a prophetic critique of the government to the nation at large. Attacking states rights, he explicitly advocated federal protection of the freedoms articulated in the Constitution.

Though more deeply engaged in American politics than ever, Smith had also placed himself and his people on the brink of fulfilling the commandment to seek government redress at the national level and thereby justifying them in taking their case back to God. And so, in the middle of his campaign for the American presidency, Smith also organized a secret Mormon government and made contingency plans to move his people once again and build a newer Zion in a farther west.

Around the same time, the Mormons in Nauvoo grew to constitute a majority of the Hancock County population. Their bloc vote now determined who would attain office. Smith’s bid for the American presidency, however unlikely, only further incensed those in western Illinois who despised the concentrated religious and political power he wielded. Conflict with the area’s early settlers, similar to that which had occurred in the counties of western Missouri, eventually led to Smith’s murder. A lynch mob gunned him down in June 1844 while he was being held prisoner in the Hancock County jailhouse. It was largely due to Smith’s assassination that the Mormon leadership determined they had fulfilled their obligations in appealing to the government.

As persecution and violence continued to grow, the Saints once again disengaged from American politics and set their sights on finding a place apart where they could live independently and peacefully. Again they looked to the far west, but this time beyond the reach of American territorial claims. Following the example of the Republic of Texas, they hoped to carve out a piece of northern Mexican territory for themselves. After the Mormons left the states, but before they reached the valley of the Great Salt Lake, America declared war on its neighbor to the west. A year after the Mormons reached their new home, the treaty ending the war placed them once again within American territory. For the moment, however, their new land was no more American than it had been Mexican. The Great Basin was Indian country. Brigham Young took up again Joseph Smith’s Zion project.

And so it was that Smith’s political ideas were not without consequence. His dream of independence and isolation affected the lives of tens of thousands of converts who migrated to the Mormon stronghold in the intermountain west. There they would struggle against the United States for another half century before submitting to its sovereignty.

Darius Gray Interview in The Daily Beast

In the wake of the successful nationwide broadcast of Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons on the Documentary Channel, the political website The Daily Beast interviewed the film’s co-producer (and director and star, etc.) Darius Gray to highlight the documentary and the place of blacks in the church. Here are a few snippits:

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From the Archives: A Bickertonite Missionary Among the Lakotas

Last week my wife and I spent five days conducting field research for my dissertation in the National Archives, Central Plains Region branch in Kansas City, Missouri. Although I’m not writing on a Mormon topic, we flagged anything that might have a Mormon connection in the Bureau of Indian Affairs files we were examining. On Friday, my wife Hope turned to me with an excited look on her face, and handed me this piece of paper:

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Nate R. on Joseph F. Smith’s Sandwich Islands Journals

Nate R. teaches American History to 8th graders and community college students in Colorado Springs. His MA Thesis on slavery in Utah won the MHA’s Best Thesis prize in 2008. His transcription of Joseph F. Smith’s Hawaiian diaries, titled “‘My Candid Opinion’: The Sandwich Islands Diaries of Joseph F. Smith,” is coming out in June.

In summer 2005 I was working as a researcher/writer for the Education in Zion Exhibit at BYU when the exhibit director, philosopher C. Terry Warner, called me into his office. He had been putting a lot of thought into it, he told me, and had decided to assign me to do the background research for one of the permanent Exhibit features: an overview of the life of Joseph F. Smith (EiZ is housed in the Joseph F. Smith Building).

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Women’s History Month at JI: Todd Compton on the Impact of Losing a Child

Todd Compton’s name should be familiar to most serious students of Mormon history. For those unfamiliar with his work, see here.

While my book In Sacred Loneliness: the Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (Signature 1997) looks carefully at Joseph Smith’s plural wives in Nauvoo, most of the book deals with their lives before and after their marriage to Joseph. Many themes emerged as I wrote those biographies–the experience of living in polygamy in Utah, feminine sisterhood, feminine ritual administration (a theme recently treated in Jonathan Stapley and Kristine Wright’s magnificent paper in the latest Journal of Mormon History), widowhood, mother-daughter relationships, mother-son relationships. In this post I would like to look at one theme from In Sacred Loneliness that really haunted me: loss of a child or children.

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Women’s History Month at JI: Vickie Speek on Elvira Field/Charley Douglass, Strang’s Plural Wife

Elvira Field is pretty much my favorite person in Mormon history–probably my favorite historical person ever! Elvira was awesome! She was a nineteenth century woman way ahead of her time: a feminist, a working mother, and a leader in the Strangite church.

Physically small and fragile, Elvira was not especially beautiful, but she had a brilliant mind and was unusually articulate. She loved plants and flowers, especially orchids, and knew their Latin names. She was also a dead-eye with a gun who could out-shoot most men. She frequently did, even when she was sixty-seven years old!

In 1831, when she was just a year old, Elvira’s parents were baptized into the fledgling Mormon church and moved to Kirtland, Ohio. Elvira and her family remained affiliated with the Mormon church, but moved to Michigan in 1837-38, instead of relocating to Missouri. After Joseph Smith Jr. was murdered in June 1844, the Field family supported the succession claims of James J. Strang rather than Brigham Young.

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Women’s History Month at JI: Janiece Johnson, “Rebecca Williams, Steadfast and Immovable: Part Deux”

As part of our continuing series celebrating Women’s History month here at JI, Janiece Johnson, graduate student at the University of Utah, has contributed the following insightful look at one early Mormon woman’s religiosity.

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