No Man Knows My History (Illustrated): The Life of Joseph Smith

by Fawn M. Brodie

It is exciting and enlightening to see a religion born. And Joseph Smith’s was no mere dissenting sect. It was a real religious creation, one intended to be to Christianity as Christianity was to Judaism: that is, a reform and a consummation.

The cornerstone of his metaphysics was that virile concept which pervaded the whole American spirit and which was indeed the noblest ideal of Jesus and Buddha, that man is capable of eternal progress toward perfection.

The source of his power lay not in his doctrine but in his person, and the rare quality of his genius was due not to his reason but to his imagination. He was a mythmaker of prodigious talent. And after a hundred years the myths he created are still an energizing force in the lives of a million followers. The moving power of Mormonism was a fable —one that few converts stopped to question, for its meaning seemed profound and its inspiration was contagious.

whatever Joseph’s inner feelings, his reputation before he organized his church was not that of an adolescent mystic brooding over visions, but of a likable ne’er-do-well who was notorious for tall tales and necromantic arts and who spent his leisure leading a band of idlers in digging for buried treasure.

Lucy Smith, when writing to her brother in 1831 the full details of the Book of Mormon and the founding of the new church, said nothing about the “first vision.” The earliest published Mormon history, begun with Joseph’s collaboration in 1834 by Oliver Cowdery, ignored it altogether, stating that the religious excitement in the Palmyra area occurred when he was seventeen (not fourteen).

Cowdery described Joseph’s visionary life as beginning in September 1823, with the vision of an angel called Moroni, who was said to have directed Joseph to the discovery of hidden golden plates. Significantly, in later years some of Joseph’s close relatives confused the “first vision” with that of the angel Moroni,

The scholarly Mormon historian B. H. Roberts once made a careful and impressive list of parallels betweenView of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon, but for obvious reasons it was never published. After his death copies were made which circulated among a limited circle in Utah.

whereView of the Hebrews was just bad scholarship, the Book of Mormon was highly original and imaginative fiction.

Joseph Smith took the whole Western Hemisphere as the setting for his book and a thousand years of history for his plot. Never having written a line of fiction, he laid out for himself a task that would have given the most experienced novelist pause.

It was now more than a year since he first asserted he had unearthed the plates, and he probably had the plan of the book worked out in his mind in considerable detail. Nevertheless, in writing the early portion of the book his literary reservoir frequently ran dry. When this happened he simply arranged for his Nephite prophets to quote from the Bible.

The Mormon Church has exaggerated the ignorance of its prophet, since the more meager his learning, the more divine must be his book. NonMormons attempting psychiatric analyses have been content to pin a label upon the youth and have ignored his greatest creative achievement because they found it dull. Dull it is, in truth, but not formless, aimless, or absurd. Its structure shows elaborate design, its narrative is spun coherently, and it demonstrates throughout a unity of purpose. Its matter is drawn directly from the American frontier, from the impassioned revivalist sermons, the popular fallacies about Indian origin, and the current political crusades.

Joseph did not trouble to explain the presence of wild animals in America, and he was careless in his choice of domestic beasts. He had the Jaredites bring horses, swine, sheep, cattle, and asses, when it was known even in his own day that Columbus had found the land devoid of these species.f He blundered similarly in having the Nephites produce wheat and barley rather than the indigenous maize and potatoes.

The lengths to which Joseph went to make his book historically plausible showed considerable ingenuity. He took pains to make the narrative chronologically accurate and filled it with predictions of events that had already taken place, stated as if they were yet to happen.

According to the local press of the time, the three witnesses all told different versions of their experience,! a fact that makes it all the more likely that the men were not conspirators but victims of Joseph’s unconscious but positive talent at hypnosis.

four witnesses were Whitmers and three were members of Joseph’s own family. The eighth witness, Hiram Page, had married a Whitmer daughter. Mark Twain was later to observe: “I could not feel more satisfied and at rest if the entire Whitmer family had testified.”

for Joseph’s vigorous and completely undisciplined imagination the line between truth and fiction was always blurred. “Behold,” said Lehi in the Book of Mormon, “I have dreamed a dream; or, in other words, I have seen a vision.” And for Joseph what was a dream one day could become a vision the next, and a reality the day after that.

The intellectual appeal of Mormon- ism, which eventually became its greatest weakness as the historical and “scientific” aspects of Mormon dogma were cruelly disemboweled by twentieth-century scholarship, was in the beginning its greatest strength.

Each convert had not only the dignity of a title but the duties attending it. He was expected to work strenuously for the church, and he did. His only recompense, and it was ample, was a conviction that he was furthering the work of the Lord in the last days.

After 1836, when the American Temperance Society adopted total abstinence in its platform, there was scarcely a Protestant preacher on the Western Reserve who had not taken the pledge. The lesser stimulants were likewise abused. Tobacco was called a “nerve-prostrating, soul-paralyzing drug, a fleshly, ungodly lust.” Coffee was deplored as an excitant to amorousness, and tea-drinking was thought to be as bad as toddy-guzzling.

The popularJournal of Health, published from 1829 to 1835, held that sparing use of meat was responsible for the robustness of the Irish, and recommended a vegetarian diet.

For some years, in fact, Joseph did not take his “Word of Wisdom” seriously. After a double wedding in January 1836 he wrote in his journal: “We then partook of some refreshments, and our hearts were made glad with the fruit of the vine. This is according to the pattern set by our Savior Himself, and we feel disposed to patronize all the institutions of heaven.” A fortnight later at the marriage of his apostle John Boynton he was presented with “three servers of glasses filled with wine” to bless. “And it fell to my lot to attend this duty,” he said, “which I cheerfully discharged. ... our hearts were made glad while partaking of the bounty of the earth which was presented, until we had taken our fill; and joy filled every bosom. . . .”

These concepts, which developed peculiar ramifications in Joseph’s later teachings, came directly from Dick, who had speculated that the stars were peopled by “various orders of intelligences,” and that these intelligences were“progressive beings” in various stages of evolution toward perfection.

The Book of Abraham in effect crystallized Joseph’s hitherto vacillating position on the Negro problem. Soon he published a statement in his church newspaper attacking the abolitionist position as one “calculated to lay waste the fair states of the South, and let loose upon the world a community of people, who might, peradventure, overrun our society, and violate the most sacred principles of human society, chastity and virtue.” “. . . we have no right,” he concluded, “to interfere with slaves, contrary to the mind and will of their masters.”

abolitionists were unpopular at this time among the majority of the Northerners, and Joseph was not prompted to espouse a cause pronounced devilish on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. His attitude reflected simply the prevailing opinion of the time.

there had been, not two, but three divisions in heaven, and that one third of the spirits had been neutral, choosing neither side, but waiting to join the victors. Orson Hyde, expounding this doctrine in 1845, stated that the neutral spirits “rather lent an influence to the devil, thinking he had a little the best way to govern, but did not take a very active part, anyway were required to come into the world and take bodies in the accursed lineage of Canaan; and hence the negro or African race.”

The discovery in 1967 that eleven fragments of the papyri had found their way to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art led to fresh interpretations by scholars which confirmed the earlier appraisals.! Joseph, however met no such competition during his life time. And even if he had, it would have mattered little to his people. It would have been the word of a mere schoolman against the word of God.

Arthur Mace of the Metropolitan Museum of Art called Joseph’s interpretation “a farrago of nonsense from beginning to end.”

A filmed copy of “Joseph Smith's Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar,” formerly unknown save to Mormon archivists, was reproduced in 1969 by Jerald Tanner of the Modern Microfilm Company in Salt Lake City. It further illustrated Joseph Smith’s extraordinary capacity for linguistic fantasy.

The revelation then went on guilelessly to grant Joseph a suite of rooms in the hotel for himself and his posterity “from generation to generation, for ever and ever.” Joseph had somehow succeeded in welding two antithetical principles — he had come to identify the goodness of God with the making of money — and had succeeded in making the union palatable to his Saints.

Joseph Smith always dictated his journal with an intense consciousness of his audience, and in the 1840’s, when he began in earnest to write the official history of his church for the edification of posterity, he reconstructed his past as only a celebrated prophet of the nineteenth century would have lived it. It was all of one color, a succession of miracles and revelations, and in no sense an evolution. It became, in fact, an almost impenetrable hiding-place, where he concealed himself behind a perpetual flow of words.

Wilford Woodruff once frankly admitted that some temple ordinances were first performed in the Masonic Temple in Nauvoo.Temple

Caswall turned triumphantly to the men present and exposed the trick. “They appeared confounded for a while,” he wrote, “but at length the Mormon doctor said: ‘Sometimes Mr. Smith speaks as a prophet, and sometimes as a mere man. If he gave a wrong opinion respecting the book, he spoke as a mere man.’

They built for him, preached for him, and made unbelievable sacrifices to carry out his orders, not only because they were convinced he was God’s prophet, but also because they loved him as a man. They were as elated when he won a wrestling match as they were awed when he dictated a new revelation. They retold tales of his generosity and tenderness, marveling that he fed so many of the poor in Nauvoo at his table without stint, and that he entertained friend and enemy alike. He was a genial host, warmhearted and friendly to all comers, and fiercely loyal to his friends.

Since Joseph was himself the personification of the church, its hero and ideal, whatever he did became a pattern for imitation. Because he took Christian theology and ethics and mixed them with business, politics, and empire-building, his people came to do the same. The result was that Mormonism became not only a belief but also a way of life. It had never pretended to be a mystical sanctification or even a new ethical code. As a religion it was as raw-boned and pragmatic as Joseph himself, and as dynamic.

Joseph was no careless libertine who could be content with clandestine mistresses. There was too much of the Puritan in him, and he could not rest until he had redefined the nature of sin and erected a stupendous theological edifice to support his new theories on marriage.

To break the ground before sowing broadcast the seeds of his new doctrine, Joseph’s press published a pamphlet in defense of polygamy by one Udney H. Jacob. Jacob produced a document of astonishing-sophistication, advocating polygamy not only in the light of Old Testament precedent, but also as a solution for marital incompatibility.

Joseph could with a certain honesty inveigh against adultery in the same week that he slept with another man’s wife, or indeed several men’s wives, because he had interposed a very special marriage ceremony. And who was to say him nay, since in the gentile world the simple pronouncement of a few timeworn phrases by any justice of peace was all that was necessary to transform fornication into blessed matrimony. The spoken word stood between him and his own guilt. And with Joseph the word was God.

For Joseph one of the worst aspects of the Bennett scandal was that instead of preaching the new marriage order more and more openly, as he had hoped to do, he was forced to ever greater secrecy. When he published the Udney Jacob pamphlet in an effort to stem the tide of revulsion against anything that hinted of matrimonial experimentation, it roused such a storm of indignation that he was obliged hastily to renounce it inTimes and Seasons as an “unmeaning rigmarole of nonsense, folly, and trash.”

Eliza Snow was the last woman in Nauvoo to stoop to spying on the man she revered as a god, and her autobiography makes it clear that she had been taught the principle of polygamy for some time before she entered it, although she hoped — and believed — that years would pass before it was actually practiced.

Noneof Joseph’s plural wives ever publicly acknowledged having conceived a child by him, which is not surprising in view of the natural delicacy of the subject and the overwhelming secrecy that has clouded the vital statistics of polygamous marriages throughout the whole of Mormon history.

By now Joseph’s attitude toward the Negro had become so liberal — partly as a result of his correspondence with the abolitionist C. V. Dyer — that he argued with Orson Hyde that if the roles of Negro and white were reversed the former would quickly assume the characteristics of the latter.f The demagogic Hyde was not impressed, and his conviction that the abolitionists were “trying to make void the curse of God” was never wholly erased from Mormon thinking, particularly since it could be reinforced by the unfortunate anti-Negro sentiments in Joseph’s Book of Abraham.!

The Mormon people are still bent on building the Kingdom of God, and everyone from the twelve-year-old deacon to the eighty-year-old high priest is made to feel that upon him depends the realization of that ideal. Here as in no other church in America the people are the church and the church the people. It is not only work and sacrifice, but a sense of participation and responsibility that generates the steadfast Mormon loyalty.

Perhaps the most vigorous tradition transmitted by Joseph Smith was the identification of God with material prosperity. The practice established at Nauvoo has been continued by the church in Utah, which controls large sections of Mormon real estate and industry. Financial wizardry has come to be looked upon as equally important with spiritual excellence among the qualifications for church leadership.

Joseph believed in the good life upon earth, in work, laughter, and brotherhood. Tolerant of the foibles of his friends, since he could not easily forget his own, he provided a heaven where all men would be saved. And he made of that heaven a continuation of the good life of earth. Since work was a prerequisite to joy in this life, so should it be in the next. Since his wife and children were dear to him, he made the marriage covenant eternal, and allowed for its expansion. Since power was sweet to him, he gave to every convert the promise of dominion over a star.

the very looseness and wildness of Joseph Smith’s utterances, quite unlike the controlled rhetoric of Brigham Young, suggest the degree to which Joseph Smith was at times truly alienated from reality.

When Joseph Smith read the expose of his polygamy in the pages of theNauvoo Expositor, published by a man whom he had respected and revered, he must have felt a shattering of his own grandiose and wholly unrealistic image of himself and his role in history. He reacted with rage and destroyed the press, though he was not normally a destructive man. He was a builder of temples and cities and kingdoms — most of all, a constructor of continuing fantasy. William Law attacked this fantasy with his simple, almost gentle exposition of reality. A man called Law had called him to account, as his parents never had, and he reacted with lawlessness.