Commentary: Policies from Trump and the Utah Legislature threaten the study of LDS history

The professional study of Mormon history was born as a collaboration between the community and the state, an unlikely alliance that prompted a cultural reckoning and launched a new era for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

That delicate balance of private faith, establishment support and public funding is now under siege, entangled in today’s partisan battles and culture wars. And the consequences for the Latter-day Saint community in particular, and the United States in general, could be dire.

During the throes of the Great Depression, as the nation struggled to stay solvent amid economic collapse, President Franklin Roosevelt introduced legislation aimed at bringing relief in the form of jobs. Among those initiatives was the Works Progress Administration that employed millions in a variety of jobs. That included a historic-documents-collection project in Utah, which featured a young, talented and underutilized historian named Juanita Brooks. With the WPA’s support, Brooks scoured communities to collect, archive and transcribe pioneer diaries.

These records meant the world to descendants, and were often used to tell faith-promoting and virtuous tales of their stalwart ancestors. But in the hands of Brooks and the other New Deal-employed historians who gathered and documented the papers, like Dale Morgan, they could be stitched together to reveal a much larger, if a bit more complicated, tapestry.

Brooks later built on that mountain of sources, many of which eventually were deposited at the Huntington Library in Southern California, to write “The Mountain Meadows Massacre,” published by Stanford University Press in 1950. Few books have caused as much of a cultural reckoning as this one. It disproved traditional narratives that had blamed Paiutes while simultaneously exonerating Latter-day Saints in the grisly killing of over a hundred migrants passing through Utah in September 1857. While it concluded Brigham Young had not ordered the massacre, it laid blame at the pioneer-prophet’s feet for cultivating an environment of fear and violence.

The book is widely acknowledged as one of the first scholarly analyses of Mormon history. And I would argue that it holds up better than nearly any other work of its era.

The rise of Leonard Arrington

It wasn’t the last to benefit, however, from this important convergence of public support, institutional backing and cultural interrogation. A generation younger than Brooks, Leonard Arrington was born and raised in rural southeastern Idaho. Thanks to FDR’s G.I. Bill, which promised educational funding for all World War II veterans, Arrington was able to leave behind the Mountain West for graduate school; scholars have noted how the G.I. Bill, the spiritual successor to the New Deal, provided millions like Arrington with a chance to expand their education and pursue options that transcended their humble origins. It also sparked the birth of the modern American university.

Taking advantage of the federal assistance, Arrington received his doctorate in economics from the University of North Carolina. He wrote his dissertation on Latter-day Saint attempts at the law of consecration during the 19th century. He then was hired by Utah State Agricultural College (the future Utah State University), a school that benefited more than most from federal investment in the postwar era. The university grew by 50% between 1945 and 1948, the very years when Arrington moved to Logan.

This mix of federal and institutional support enabled Arrington to produce “Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900.” The book, published by Harvard University Press and subsidized by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, appeared in 1958.

Like Brooks’ Mountain Meadows volume, “Great Basin Kingdom” is regarded as a landmark in Mormon scholarship. It disrupted many traditional myths by demonstrating how the Utah-based church and its leaders fit within their larger context, particularly in how their economic views and practices mingled with the growing capitalistic ethos of 19th-century America.

The two books by Brooks and Arrington launched a new scholarly tradition that eventually became branded as “New Mormon History.” Both were the result of rigorous research in private collections as well as repositories like those held in church archives in Salt Lake City.

While only one name appeared on each cover, the books were also the result of a community of support: federal programs that provided funding, institutions that granted support, and local communities that assisted in many unheralded ways. In return, their words helped shape the surrounding environment for generations, influencing school textbooks, church curriculum, even the public consciousness.

The best historical works are like that. They are the product of overlapping circles of influence: individuals, societies, organizations and states.

Federal and state clampdowns

That overlapping sense of interests, always tenuous, is now severely challenged. The Trump administration has waged a war on what it calls “woke” scholarship, which includes all work that it does not deem “patriotic history.”

These ideological salvos have been followed by real attacks: Federal officials canceled millions of dollars in congressionally approved grants from National Endowment for the Humanities that had been issued to historians and other scholars and have ordered reviews of museums to ensure that they are not focused on the “negatives” of the past. The administration is redirecting much of its money instead to statues and monuments, silent structures that focus on triumph and do not require any reckoning or reflection.

Dozens of universities, meanwhile, have found themselves in the White House’s crosshairs. Many have been forced either to give in to partisan demands concerning governance and curriculum or else lose billions of federal dollars. Nor do Utah’s schools only have to deal with Washington: the state’s Legislature has waged a similar war against higher education with measures aimed at clawing back funding from programs deemed “woke” or associated with “diversity, equity and inclusion,” a vague matrix that often harms humanities fields.

Utah’s humanities scene has already felt the hit. Universities are grappling with the new reality, and programs that relied on the Utah Humanities organization are forced to scramble for new funding.

While these developments can be seen as part of the partisan wars, they can have real and tragic consequences for the Latter-day Saint historical community. The sad reality is that, in some important ways, today’s budding scholars have fewer resources at their disposal than did Juanita Brooks and Leonard Arrington.

Fortunately, there are organizations like the Mormon History Association that cultivate a welcoming and rigorous community of like-minded researchers. And the Latter-day Saint Church History Library is much more accommodating than during the mid-20th century. Indeed, the faith’s history department, which boasts arguably the nation’s largest collection of doctorate-credentialed scholars in American religious history, has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the nation’s previous investment in higher education and historical training.

Will that be enough to offset the clear obstacles now being established in a country where academic investigation is increasingly swallowed up in the culture wars? Will the historical interrogation that is powerful enough to move communities and force reckonings — the type of scholarship Brooks and Arrington triumphed — receive necessary support, let alone a welcome reception?

Can we ever again achieve the shared interests of individual, community and state to birth another historical awakening?

Note to readers • Benjamin E. Park is president of the Mormon History Association. He teaches history at Sam Houston State University and is author or editor of five books, including “American Zion: A New History of Mormonism.” This article is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.