Response: J.B. Haws Answers Questions about his recent JMH article and his forthcoming book (Part II)

We’re pleased today to welcome back J.B. Haws for Part II of our Q & A on his recent article in the JMH and his forthcoming book, The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (Oxford, December 2013), both exploring the changing image of Mormons in American media from George Romney’s presidential run in the 1960s to his son Mitt Romney’s campaigns in the early 21st century. Last time, we focused mainly on Haws’ methods and sources. Today, we’re exploring specific aspects of his analysis and a few of his conclusions.

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Response: J.B. Haws Answers Questions about his recent JMH article and his forthcoming book (Part I)

In August, I reviewed J.B. Haws’ recent article ?When Mormonism Mattered Less in Presidential Politics: George Romney?s 1968 Window of Possibilities?, published in the summer issue of the Journal of Mormon History. Haws, an Assistant Professor of Church History at BYU, graciously agreed to participate in a Q & A to answer some of my lingering questions and those submitted by members of the JI community. In the course of our conversation, we also discussed how the research he presented in his article is extended in his forthcoming (and highly-anticipated!) book, The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (Oxford, December 2013), which promises to be an important and much-needed addition to our understanding of Mormonism in the contemporary period, as well as of public representations (and misrepresentations) of Mormonism across the last half of the 20th century.

JBH: I should say, by way of preface, that as I read through your questions, my reaction after every one was to think, ?Wow?great question.?  But I?m going to resist typing that every time (but just know I?m still thinking that!).  Thanks for these thoughtful and thought-provoking questions.

CHJ: Thank you, J. B.! We’re excited that you were willing to offer us some answers. So?let’s get to it!

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Responses: Paul Harvey and Edward Blum respond to Noel Carmack’s Review Essay in the Journal of Mormon History

Almost exactly one year ago, the University of North Carolina Press published Edward Blum and Paul Harvey’s The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America, a sweeping and provocative analysis of the ways in which Americans from various walks of life over the last four hundred (!) years have imagined Jesus. Among the many contributions the book makes, and of particular interest to JI readers, is the authors’ situating Mormons as important players in the larger story of race and religion they narrate so masterfully. In fact, one paragraph in particular has garnered more attention than nearly any other part of the book—a brief discussion in chapter 9 of the large, white marble Christus statue instantly recognizable to Mormons the world over. In the latest issue of the Journal of Mormon History, Noel Carmack authored a 21 page review of The Color of Christ, focusing on their treatment of Mormonism and paying particular attention to their discussion of the Christus. Professors Blum and Harvey generously accepted our invitation to respond here, as part of both our ongoing Responses series and as an appropriate contribution to our look at Mormon material culture this month. 

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Review: Haws, “When Mormonism Mattered Less in Presidential Politics: George Romney’s 1968 Window of Possibilities”

Mitt Romney?s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns came to seem, in the media frenzy of the last few years, like bookends to America?s much-touted Mormon moment. But Americans? fascination with the Latter-day Saints did not begin or end with Mitt Romney. This is not the first period in American history when non-Mormon Americans have, to some extent, embraced their LDS neighbors. In fact, Mitt Romney isn?t even the first Republican Romney whose religious affiliation has colored his national political image. His father George, the successful head of the American Motor Company in the 1950s and popular governor of Michigan in the 1960s, was a prominent candidate for the 1968 Republican nomination for President. Also like Mitt, George owed at least some measure of his political success to a period of increased interest in and positive feeling towards the Mormons. As J.B. Haws, Assistant Professor of Church History at BYU, shows in his article in the most recent issue of the Journal of Mormon History, George Romney?s candidacy was not seen as tainted by a ?Mormon problem,? as were his son?s campaigns a half-century later. [1] In the United States in the 1960s, the Romneys? Mormonism simply ?mattered less? than it does in the 21^st century. And if it mattered at all, Haws argues, it did so by lending George Romney the air of ?benign wholesomeness? that characterized public perceptions of the Latter-day Saints in this period (99).

Haws? current article is based on the research for his forthcoming book The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (OUP, November 2013), and essentially lays the groundwork for that longer study, in which he traces public perceptions of Mormonism in the American media across the last half-century. In the 1960s, he argues, George Romney ran for the Republican nomination for the presidency and faced remarkably few challenges to his religion?or at least what look like remarkably few challenges to those of us who lived through the most recent Mormon moment. By comparing political polling data from both Romneys? campaigns and examining news coverage of the elder Romney?s presidential aspirations and editorial commentary on his campaign and on the larger question of the role a candidate?s religion should play in voters? assessment of his fitness for office, Haws convincingly demonstrates that Americans were less concerned in the 1960s?or at least said they were less concerned?by the possibility of having a Mormon in the White House than were their early 21^st-century counterparts. While George Romney?s religion was occasionally challenged?primarily, Haws claims, regarding the Church?s policies on race (remember, George Romney was running for the presidency in the midst of the Civil Rights movements, and a decade before the Church lifted its ban on blacks in the priesthood)?according to Haws it was not Romney?s religion but his moderate politics and his ill-advised declaration in 1967 that he had been ?brainwashed? into supporting the Vietnam war that sunk him with American voters. In short, Haws argues that political views, not religious beliefs, were the elder Romney?s greatest obstacles.

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Guest Post: Ken Alford on the Mormon Civil War Vets and the GAR

Today’s guest post is from Ken Alford, an Associate Professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University. After serving almost 30 years on active duty in the United States Army, he retired as a Colonel in 2008. While on active duty, Ken served in numerous personnel, automation, acquisition, and education assignments, including the Pentagon, eight years teaching at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and four years as Professor and Department Chair at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. His most recent book, Civil War Saints, was published in 2012. Ken and his wife, Sherilee, have four children and ten grandchildren.

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Guest Post: Patrick Mason, “God Bless America: Ezra Taft Benson’s Exceptionalist Patriotism”

[Another installment in this month’s series on “Mormonism and Politics,” this post is authored by Patrick Mason. Patrick, a friend of and mentor to many on the blog, is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University, and his works include The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Post-Bellum South and (co-edited with David Pulsipher and Richard Bushman) War and Peace in Our Times: Mormon Perspectives. He is currently working on a biography of Ezra Taft Benson and a book on Mormon peace ethics. More recent family hobbies, supposedly related to peace ethics, include sneaking onto his former property with shovels and garbage bags to dig up grape vines and other shrubbery.]

The 1950s was a heady time for God in America.  Postwar enthusiasm and the fear of the surge of international “godless Communism” helped spark a national revival of religion, both privately and publicly.  Billy Graham emerged not only as the nation’s top revivalist but also as one of its biggest celebrities.  “In God We Trust” replaced the more secularly inflected “E Pluribus Unum” as the nation’s motto, and “under God” got plugged into the Pledge of Allegiance.

Dwight Eisenhower’s appointment of LDS apostle Ezra Taft Benson as Secretary of Agriculture both reflected and enhanced this national religious renewal.  Among students of Mormon history, Benson is well known for his association with the virulently anticommunist and arch-conservative John Birch Society.  Benson never formally joined the JBS, but his son Reed became a national coordinator for the society and Ezra publicly stated on many occasions the he was “convinced that The John Birch Society was the most effective non-church organization in our fight against creeping socialism and Godless Communism.”  (The best current treatment of this is in Greg Prince’s Dialogue article, here.)

Although his encounter with the John Birch Society in 1961 was significant for Benson, and in many ways helped define him and his public work for at least the entire decade of the 1960s, Benson did not need JBS founder Robert Welch to tell him that communism was evil or that America was God’s country.  (We sometimes forget that virtually everyone in America, John F. Kennedy included, was an ardent anticommunist during the Cold War.)  It’s more accurate to say that the John Birch Society was something like the salt that brought out the natural flavoring already inherent in Benson’s makeup.

Indeed, if we rewind nearly a decade before Benson ever heard of the society–several years before JBS even existed, in fact–we see an Ezra Taft Benson whose ardent patriotism is itself an article of faith.  In an address given to the BYU student body on December 1, 1952, immediately after he had accepted his Cabinet appointment (but about six weeks before the Eisenhower administration would begin), Benson spoke on the relationship between the LDS Church and politics.[1]

When Eisenhower approached him about the job, Benson immediately offered several objections, including the fact that he had supported Ike’s opponent in the Republican primary.  But one of Ike’s clinching arguments came when he told the apostle, “Surely you believe that the job to be done is spiritual.  Surely you know that we have the great responsibility to restore confidence in the minds of our people in their own government “ that we’ve got to deal with spiritual matters.”  Eisenhower thus framed government service as service to God, an argument that Benson would embrace whole-hog.  This helped him assuage any doubts he may have had about securing a leave of absence from his full duties as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, as he was simply temporarily exchanging one high-level calling from God for another.

In his address to the BYU students, Benson outlined some of his core principles.  Central to his worldview was the inviolable and unmatched sanctity of the God-given principle of freedom of choice.  For Benson, everything began with and came back to this one principle.  It would come to define his political philosophy, his economic philosophy, and his religious philosophy.  It also defined his patriotism.  He would travel to dozens of nations during his time as Secretary, but his worldview had already been shaped by his mission to Europe in 1946, where he oversaw LDS relief and humanitarian efforts, and where he personally witnessed both the devastation of war and the slow retreat of freedom behind the lowering Iron Curtain.

To the BYU students, he proclaimed, “It’s a great blessing to live in America.  It’s a great blessing to have the opportunity to enjoy the freedoms which are ours today.  I have seen people, thousands of them, who have lost the freedom which is ours. . . .  I’d rather be dead than lose my liberty. . . .  When our system is criticized, just keep in mind the fruits of the system, the great blessings that have come to us because of our American way of life.”

Much of Benson’s love for and faith in the divine mission and millennial destiny of America came from the Book of Mormon, a text he returned to time and again throughout his life.  He cited Book of Mormon passages about America being a “choice land” in every possible forum, from General Conference addresses to agricultural stump speeches to personal memos to President Eisenhower.  Standing at the apex of the long Latter-day Saint tradition of sacralizing America, Benson often expressed his conviction that the Constitution of the United States was a “sacred document,” its words “akin to the revelations of God.”  He was certain that “when the Lord comes, the Stars and Stripes will be floating on the breeze over this people.”[2]

The United States of America was not perfect, Benson conceded–the “creeping socialism” of the New Deal had eroded the sure foundations of the constitutional republic–but it was an essential part of God’s perfect plan for His children.  But no Saint ever had to apologize for being a true-hearted American.  God had indeed blessed America, and to honor the nation and its founding principles was to honor God.

Ezra Taft Benson was hardly the first nor the only Mormon to be an American exceptionalist or conservative constitutionalist.  But perhaps more than any other single individual, he solidified a “special relationship” between twentieth-century Mormonism and the nation, a relationship that he alone, by virtue of both his high ecclesiastical and public office, was in a position to broker, and which no one championed more loudly, publicly, and sometimes controversially, than he did, for nearly half a century.

[1] Ezra Taft Benson, ?The L.D.S. Church and Politics,? Brigham Young University devotional address, Dec. 1, 1952; typescript in L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, BYU.  This address is one of many Benson speeches that have been given new life on the internet by LDS conservatives; for instance here.

[2] Ezra Taft Benson, The Constitution:  A Heavenly Banner (Salt Lake City:  Deseret Book Co., 1986), 31, 33.

Joseph F. Smith and the New York Draft Riots, Part 2: 13 & 14 July 1863

This is the second in a three-part series of posts about Joseph F. Smith?s experiences during the New York Draft Riots of July 1863.  See the first part here.

Image:  CHARGE OF THE POLICE ON THE RIOTERS AT THE “TRIBUNE” OFFICE, Harper?s Weekly, August 1, 1863, p. 484 [1]

Joseph F. Smith arrived in New York City on July 6, 1863, after an unremarkable journey from Liverpool (though he did mention with disappointment on July 4^th that ?no demonstrations were mad[e] to commemorate the aneversery of American Independence,?[2] ).  He had been recently released from his missionary duties in the British Isles Mission, and was fulfilling an assignment to see several groups of Mormon emigrants safely into the U.S. and on their way toward Utah.  

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Guest Post: Bradley Kime on Mormonism in Thomas Albert Howard’s God and the Atlantic

Today, we are pleased to announce a guest post on our July theme,  Mormons and Politics, from Bradley Kime. Here is a brief bio from Bradley: 

I just graduated from BYU with a BA in History. My Phi Kappa Phi paper, “American Unitarians and the George B. English Controversy” will be published in Religion in the Age of Enlightenment next summer, and my capstone paper, “Exhibiting Theology: James E. Talmage and Mormon Public Relations, 1915-1920,” is under review. I’ll be heading up to Utah State in a few weeks to work with Phil Barlow on an MA in History. 

I just finished reading Thomas Albert Howard’s God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). It’s a brilliant book that touches on JI’s themes for this month and last (politics and the many images of Mormonism). Howard wrote it in response to what many perceive to be the growing trans-Atlantic political implications of American religiosity vis-a-vis European secularity. Howard’s take is that a long-standing elite European discourse on American religion, which he traces through the nineteenth-century and into the twentieth, has “left a sizable mark on the formative presuppositions” behind current policy differences and European perceptions of America. (200) In other words, he argues that elite European critiques of American religion in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries still impact trans-Atlantic political divisions in the twenty-first. And Mormonism seems to have been a particularly consistent target of those critiques. Along with some forays into the secularization and modernity debate, and the retrieval of two sympathetic commentators (Phillip Schaff and Jacques Maritain) from Tocqueville’s shadow, this is primarily a book about negative images of American religion as peddled by its cultured despisers across the pond.

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Joseph F. Smith and the New York City Draft Riots, Part 1: Background

Image:  ?The Riots in New York: The Mob Lynching a Negro in Clarkson-Street? [1]

One of the things that first interested me about Joseph F. Smith was his personality as a diarist.  He liked to pen elaborate descriptions of impressive places he visited, such as the ancient Mo?okini heiau (temple) in Hawaii, the famous Mauna Loa volcano, or the Wentworth Castle and Estates near Barnsley, England.[2]  He cataloged what he saw as faults in others, ranging from family members, to LDS church enemies, to people he encountered as a missionary.[3]  He recorded seemingly insignificant details and used trite or repetitive phrases (some of which have crept into my own journaling vocabulary), in the process illuminating much about his education, priorities, biases, and spirituality.[4]  And we can?t leave out the infamous cat massacre that Amanda HK described in a post some time ago.

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The Political Culture of Mormon History

[This is the first post in our “Mormonism & Politics” series for the month of July; it also repeats and expands articles from a roundtable on “The New New Political History,” hosted at The Junto in January.]

This political sketch of Joseph Smith leading a Nauvoo Legion filled with women embodies the intersecting categories of gender, power, and politics of political culture.

Methodological and historiographical trends tend to lag behind in Mormon scholarship, but many new theories typically do end up taking root and making an impact. The New Social History move of the 1970s became nearly synonymous with New Mormon History, post-structuralism influenced discussions of Mormon founding narratives, and phenemonological approaches have recently taken hold of projects that attempt to capture the lived experience of Latter-day Saints. These methods have all enriched the scholarship on the pages of Journal of Mormon History and enlivened the halls of the Mormon History Association, though incorporation remains stagnant and uneven, primarily due to the mixed nature of the field. The further progression of Mormon scholarship within the broader academy will depend on its ability to better appropriate these and numerous other methodological tools in order to produce a more sophisticated corpus.

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