Did Mormonism Start with the First Vision?

During the past week, several of JI’s permabloggers have begun writing short intros to the birth of Mormonism for theses, dissertations, or articles. All of us expressed a desire to start the narrative after 1820, the year generally attributed to Joseph Smith’s First Vision.  

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Jared Hickman on “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse”

Several years ago–perhaps 2009 or 2010–I first heard about a paper slated to be published in a major literary journal that radically reinterpreted the Book of Mormon as an Amerindian apocalypse. Whispers of both its imminent publication and its brilliance continued, and at some point, I was forwarded a prepublication draft of the paper. This isn’t altogether unusual in Mormon Studies–unpublished papers and theses, typescripts of difficult-to-access manuscript sources, and PDFs of out-of-print books passed from person to person have a long, storied, and sometime litigious history in the often insular world of Mormon scholarship. But unlike other instances I’m aware of, the importance of this paper was not in its access to otherwise unavailable primary source material or its controversial content, but rather in its interpretive significance.

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Pioneer Day: Recommended Reading from JI’s archives

Happy Pioneer Day, readers! Thank you for your patience with us lately — we know things have been slow around here (they tend to get that way during the summer), but we have some exciting things planned moving forward and hope you’ll keep checking in, reading, and commenting moving forward.

In recognition of Pioneer Day, I’ve culled from the Juvenile Instructor’s archives links to several previous posts treating Mormon Pioneers in one sense or another. In hopes that they’ll prove interesting to those who missed them the first time around (and to those, like me, interested in revisiting them), here we go:

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Fawn Brodie, Joseph Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Bushman, and Psychoanalysis

No, the title of this post is not the opening for one of those “…walk into a bar…” jokes, although it does provide good potential.[1]

NOTE: This post doesn’t aim to make a particular argument, or perhaps to say much new, but merely to express some issues that have been circling my mind for a while, and conclude one of those historical nerd tangential interests that we all know so well.

Apparently not satisfied with merely enraging Mormon historians, Brodie later tried to do the same to Jeffersonian scholars.

A few months ago, in a conversation on the H-SHEAR list (an email group focused on the history of the early American republic), someone made a reference to Fawn Brodie’s biography of Thomas Jefferson. Then, as an aside, the writer added, “Incidentally, Fawn Brodie is in my view the Rosalind Franklin of American history. There are many Watsons and Cricks in the historical profession who owe her a posthumous apology.” Franklin, for those of you (like me) who aren’t encyclopedias of this type of knowledge, was a biophysicist who studied DNA in the early 1950s. Watson and Crick, who were dismissive and rude toward Franklin in public and private throughout her life, accessed her data without her knowledge, much less permission, and used that data to make the critical leap in insight that elucidated the structure of DNA. They published with no mention of Franklin’s contribution and went on to great fame and a Nobel Prize a decade later.[2]

While Brodie is mostly known in Mormon circles for her controversial biography of Joseph Smith, she is more widely known in the American historical community for her innovative use of psychohistory, especially in her biographies of Thomas Jefferson and, less successfully, Richard Nixon. Indeed, No Man Knows My History was merely her entrance into the historical profession, where afterward she became one of the foremost practitioners of psychohistory American political biography, and was even one of the first tenured female professors at UCLA. Most especially, her Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Life (W. W. Norton, 1974) was a national bestseller and instigator of much debate in the academic community. In the book, Brodie focused on Jefferson’s private life, and was one of the first to strongly argue that there was a relationship between the president and his slave, Sally Hemings. The book was a commercial success, but was panned by many historians, especially Jeffersonian scholars, who rejected the thesis that Jefferson would procreate with a slave. Many historians rejected Browdie’s interpretation of Jefferson, just as Mormon historians rejected her interpretation of Joseph Smith.[3]

Several decades later, however, Brodie’s argument was vindicated.

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Mormon Studies in the 7th Grade Utah Studies Classroom

As my contribution to the Juvenile Instructor?s series on Mormon Studies in the Classroom, I thought I?d discuss the place of Mormonism in the Utah Studies course, which is a required class for all 7^th graders in the state?s public schools.  The structure, sources, and activities for such a class are necessarily tailored to a younger audience than those of the other courses that will make up this series, but I think it?s important to consider how less-seasoned?and more often than not, less-willing?students interact with Mormon studies.

I?m only in my second year teaching the Utah Studies Course, but have been given a lot of latitude by my school (which is a charter school that employs the Core Knowledge Sequence for its main curriculum).  So I?ve put a lot of thought into what I?d like my course to look like, where I think Mormonism should fit, and what I want my adolescent audience to take away from the course.

Course Objective:

The Utah Core Curriculum introduction to the Utah Studies Course says this: 

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“A son of the Forest” and “an intelligent son of Abraham”: Orson Hyde and Samuel Smith meet William Apess, 1832

In June 1832, Orson Hyde and Samuel H. Smith arrived in Boston, Massachusetts to preach Mormonism to the people of what was then the fourth largest city in the United States. The previous year, a young Methodist woman had traveled from Boston to Kirtland, Ohio, been baptized a Mormon, and then returned to her Massachusetts home. That woman—Vienna Jacques—had prepared several of her friends and family members for the arrival of the itinerant missionaries, and Hyde and Smith gained several converts that summer, a number of whom came from the Bromfield Street Methodist Episcopal Church, to which Jacques had belonged prior to her conversion to Mormonism.[1]

The Mormon Reserve

This installment of the JI’s Mormons and Natives Month comes from Paul Reeve, associate professor of history at the University of Utah and frequent guest blogger at the JI.

In every instance where Mormons faced growing animosity from outsiders and tension escalated between Mormons and their neighbors, accusations of a Mormon-Indian conspiracy were among the charges. The Mormon expulsions from Jackson County, Missouri, from Clay County, Missouri, and from the state of Missouri altogether, along with their exodus from Nauvoo, Illinois, and the later Utah War were all events notably marked by claims that Mormons were combining with Indians to wage war against white America.

Outsiders did not always see war and conspiracy, however, when they conflated Mormons with Indians. Sometimes the conflation was in the search for a solution to the Mormon problem. Such was the case in early 1845 as residents of Hancock County, Illinois cast about for a resolution to their increasingly untenable situation. As my contribution to JI’s Mormons and Natives theme month, I offer below an excerpt from my book project, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (Oxford). It describes a little known effort following the Murder of Joseph and Hyrum Smith to find a peaceful resolution to the tension between “old settlers” in Hancock County and the Mormons. It is an interesting episode in its own right; but beyond the details of the story, larger themes emerge, a tangled weave of Mormon and Indian threads which outsiders sometimes used to blur the distinction between the two groups and justify discriminatory policies against both.

Within seven months of the murder of the Smith brothers, one minor political figure, William P. Richards from Macomb, Illinois, fifty miles East of Nauvoo, offered a potential solution to the mounting tension between the Mormons and Hancock County residents. In February 1845, Richards proposed a plan patterned after the Indian Removal Act (1830) from the previous decade. This time the correlation between Mormons and Indians moved in a new direction, toward a potential resolution of the Mormon problem that was based upon the Indian solution. In light of the continuing strain between Mormons and outsiders, a condition that Richards believed was “on the very eve of violent and bloody collision,” he offered a plan. His proposal called for a land “Reserve to be set apart by Congress for the Mormon people exclusively,” a place where they would be “safe from intrusion and molestation.” He called for a twenty-four mile square section of land, North of Illinois and West of Wisconsin, bordering the western edge of the Mississippi River, to be “forever set apart and known and designated as the Mormon Reserve.” With a design reminiscent of Indian reservations, Richards’ proposal authorized the president to appoint and the Senate to ratify a “superintendent” to administer the reserve and ensure that only Mormons settled there. They would be allowed to draft a constitution for themselves, so long as it did not violate the U. S. Constitution, and thereby enjoy a measure of freedom and self-determination.

As the proposal circulated locally, Richards defended it and met with Mormon leaders to cultivate their favor. The initial response from the Mormons was positive, although one leader believed that twenty-four square miles was inadequate space for the growing number of Mormons. Richards was not opposed to a larger reserve or to other potential locations in Oregon, Texas, or land west of Indian Territory.

In making his case, Richards noted that the Indian Removal Act established a precedent for such a land reserve. It was a policy for the Indians that he deemed “at once enlightened and humane.” It moved them to a country where they were “secure from future intrusion” and put them in possession of homes that were “sure and permanent.” Richards admitted that it was “not very complimentary to the Mormons to place them in the same category” as the Indians, but his focus was upon a peaceful solution to the Mormon problem and he believed that the example of Indian removal offered exactly that. As he saw it, removing the Mormons to land “set apart for their exclusive occupancy and use” would eliminate the threat of outside persecution. With persecution eliminated as a binding force among Mormons internally, Richards predicted “their present rampant religious zeal would evaporate in a single generation and the Sect as such, become extinct.” If they stayed at Nauvoo, he feared the opposite, “constant turmoil, collision, outrage and perchance,–extensive bloodshed.”

It was an echo from President Andrew Jackson’s justifications for the Indian Removal Act (1830). Jackson, in his 1830 State of the Union Address, argued that providing the Native Americans land West of the Mississippi River and far removed from outside interference was a humane option designed to save the Indians from extinction. “The waves of population and civilization are rolling to the westward,” he argued, and the Indian Removal Act would send the Indians “to a land where their existence may be prolonged and perhaps made perpetual.” To save the Indian from “perhaps utter annihilation, the General Government kindly offers him a new home.”

Beyond a period of local discussion and debate, Richards’ plan did not generate enough interest nationally to garner serious consideration. It did nonetheless indicate the persistent ways in which some outsiders linked Mormons to Indians, not just as a danger, but also in the search for a solution. It further demonstrated how dramatically Mormons were deemed different, a people so distinct, so potentially hostile to American democracy, that they required physical separation, ostensibly to preserve them from the crush of civilization but in reality to preserve civilization from the threat of Mormon savagery.

Rather than an organized “reserve,” Illinois citizens banished the Mormons to their own fate, an expulsion from “civilization” to a new refuge in northern Mexico among “savage” bands of Great Basin Indians. In light of the earlier accusations surrounding the Missouri expulsions, the Mormons found themselves in an ironic bind. As Brigham Young put it, Missourians had accused them of the “intention to tamper with the Indians” and so removed them from that state and their relative proximity to the Indians. Then, ten years later, he said, “it was found equally necessary . . . to drive us from Nauvoo into the very midst of the Indians, as unworthy of any other society.” It was an absurd contradiction for the Mormons, one in which they recognized their own marginalization alongside Native Americans, people whom they were supposed to simultaneously stay away from for fear of conspiracy and live amongst for lack of whiteness

Painting the Mythical and the Heroic: Joseph Smith Preaches to the American Indians

By Laura Allred Hurtado, with David G. Note: This represents preliminary and ongoing research for the Armitage painting. 

In 1890, British born painter and founder of the Utah Art Association William Armitage created the massive historic painting, Joseph Smith Preaching to the Indians. The artwork, which once hung with prominence in the Salt Lake Temple, now fills the wall leading up to the 2nd floor of the Church History Museum. The scale itself means that it demands the attention of the entire room, standing almost as a sentinel within the space. The painting depicts, as the title suggests, a well-dressed Smith preaching to a crowd of nearly forty American Indians which surround the frame. Smith?s outstretched right arm gestures heavenward while his left hand holds the Book of Mormon, a book that according to historian Ronald W. Walker was ?not just a record of the ?Lamanite? or Native American people, but a highly unusual manifesto of their destiny.?[1] Smith stands triumphantly and confidently among this crowd of mostly male Indians whose expressions vary from guarded, taken aback, distrusting, perhaps even provoked but in all instances, they are engaged, looking toward Joseph and his distinct message regarding the destiny of North America?s Indigenous peoples.

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Mormons and Natives Month at the JI

For the past several months, the JI has sponsored various theme months, allowing permas and guests to ruminate on such topics as politics, the international church, and material culture. November is Native American Heritage Month, which was first promoted in the Progressive Era by reform-minded Indians to recognize the contributions of Natives to the development of the United States. As in the case of Black History Month and Women’s History Month, we at the JI believe that Natives are an intricate part of Mormon history, rather than a sub-topic only worthy of discussion once a year, but we also see the value in focusing our thoughts at this time in conjunction with Native American Heritage Month. This month’s editors, David G., Amanda, and Farina, have assembled an all-star cast of guest bloggers, who will share fascinating insights from their research, alongside contributions from permas. The editors have also put together some brief thoughts on their areas of expertise for this introductory post.

Mormonism’s Encounters with Native America in the 19th Century (David G.)

From the earliest days of Mormonism, indigenous peoples were central to Joseph Smith?s vision of the future.

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Visionary/Prophetic Children: A Research Query

As my contribution to this month’s theme of childhood, children, and youth, I want to throw around a couple of loosely-formed thoughts on how Mormonism fits into the history of childhood spirituality.

First, Mormons sometimes claim that the reason God appeared and spoke to the boy Joseph Smith that spring day in 1820 was specifically because JS was just a boy. As in the days of Samuel, God needed a pure vessel, one simultaneously untainted by worldly knowledge and skepticism and eager to learn and obey.

Of course, Joseph Smith isn’t the only boy/young man to experience a vision and receive a prophetic calling, and Mormons aren’t the only ones to connect the dots between the receipt of those visions and childhood innocence/willingness. American Christians have long used both the Old and New Testaments to bolster the claims of boy (and less commonly, girl) prophets and preachers. One researcher has found nearly 500 examples of child preachers from the 18th century until the present, and the phenomenon is particularly common in charismatic Christian churches, as the fascinating and somewhat tragic story of Marjoe Gortner illustrates. While historians have done a wonderful job of contextualizing Joseph Smith within the larger American prophetic tradition, they/we have mostly ignored where and how he fits into the history of childhood preachers/prophets. It seems like a potentially fruitful framework for understanding JS and his prophetic calling in new light.

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