For decades, Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History : The Life of Joseph Smith has been widely considered the best available biography of Joseph Smith. While Brodie admittedly engaged in speculation and was sometimes less than demanding of her evidence, her prose created a vivid, muscular, lifelike Joseph — a Joseph who could have done the things that Joseph in fact did. This dynamic and human interpretation of Joseph’s personality is the thread that holds together the disparate events of Joseph’s life, producing a satisfying and uniquely readable literary whole. Furthermore, Brodie’s somewhat speculative treatment of themes like Joseph’s involvement in New England money-digging culture, polygamy, the Danites, early Mormon theocracy, and so forth have largely set the agenda for Mormon Studies research in the six decades or so since the first edition of her work appeared. Brodie has not been vindicated on all counts (the supposed affair with Fanny Alger, for example, seems to have been a marriage instead), but her intellectual influence has been immense. Has Richard L. Bushman’s Joseph Smith : Rough Stone Rolling finally managed to replace Brodie’s book as the best life of Joseph?
Certainly Bushman’s book has advantages over Brodie’s and, indeed, all other competing biographies of Joseph Smith. Unlike Brodie or Donna Hill, Bushman is able to incorporate the pathbreaking Mormon history of the 1980s and 1990s. Bushman’s Joseph begins deeply enmeshed in the treasure-digging culture of his time and place and brings that culture into his early religious activities, even translating the Book of Mormon in part using his treasure-digging practice of gazing at a seerstone in a hat. Bushman’s Joseph marries other men’s wives, founds a theocratic Council of Fifty, and is crowned the political king of all the Earth. In short, this new Joseph looks a lot more like the Joseph of Dialogue or Sunstone than The Ensign. By bringing this historical research into a context where it is made more available to mainstream Mormons, Bushman has done the Mormon community a major service.
Yet Bushman’s book has, in my opinion, at least three serious shortcomings. Let me proceed from the least important to the most vital. First, Bushman imagines Joseph as relentlessly obedient to the revelations that he received. Among the many repetitions of this claim are the following three. After the Missouri conflict, Bushman states that Joseph “never questioned his own revelations, never doubted the validity of the commandments” (380). In the context of the Twelve’s mission to England, Joseph’s revealed “commandment had to be obeyed” (386) in spite of overwhelming practical obstacles. Later on, Bushman offers the summary characterization that “Joseph ordinarily followed the commandments punctiliously, as if disobedience put him at risk” (437).
However well this kind of single-minded commitment to revelealed instructions may have characterized Joseph in some domains, though, it is an incomplete picture of the man. As Bushman notes, history gives us record of Joseph resisting and delaying a divine command to marry polygamously (437-38). In his practice of polygamy, Joseph in fact repeatedly disobeyed the explicit stipulations of his recorded revelation on the subject:
And again, as pertaining to the law of the priesthood — if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouses the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified; he cannot commit adultery for they are given unto him; for he cannot commit adultery with that that belongeth unto him and to no one else (Doctrine and Covenants 132:61).
Joseph clearly disobeyed two requirements of this revelation. First, he married extensively without his wife’s permission. There is evidence that Emma temporarily approved of a few of Joseph’s marriages (Bushman 494), but she was evidently ignorant of Joseph’s early polygamous marriages and also of the full extent of his later marriages. For the most part, in Bushman’s words, Emma “completely rejected plural marriage” (496). When Emma rejected polygamy, she may have activated a later stipulation in the revelation: when a first wife rejects the teaching, her husband “is exempt from the law of Sarah,” i.e., the requirement that his wife approve of any new wives. So Joseph’s later marriages may have been exempt from this revealed requirement — but his early marriages, before Emma was informed of the practice, would seem to constitute clear violations of the revelation.
Joseph also repeatedly broke a second rule in the revelation by marrying women who were concurrently married to other husbands. The revelation emphasizes that plural wives must be “virgins” (presumably excluding currently married women as well as, perhaps, widows) and notes explicitly that they must have “vowed to no other man.” Hence, the ten women that Joseph married who were concurrently married to other men (Bushman 439; see also Todd Compton’s In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith) would seem to be exactly the kinds of wives who were forbidden by the revelation. By contracting such marriages anyway, Joseph evidently broke the revealed commandment.
In a perhaps less consequential vein, Joseph seems to have essentially disregarded the revealed Word of Wisdom throughout his life. For instance, Joseph and the others in Carthage Jail all drank some wine to improve their emotional state the night before Joseph and his brother Hyrum were killed (Bushman 549). Occasional alcohol consumption was evidently a lifelong practice for Joseph. This fact strikes me as relatively unimportant, but, like the violations linked with polygamy discussed above, it is nonetheless hard to reconcile with Bushman’s “punctiliously” revelation-following Joseph.
A second, larger flaw that I see in Bushman’s biography is its refusal to engage with the question of the historical interpretation of Joseph’s claimed vision experiences. Bushman excuses his decision to disregard debate and treat Joseph’s visions as subjectively real in the following way:
…[T]here are reasons for not inserting a disclaimer every time a revelation is mentioned, no matter how the reader or writer feels about the ultimate source. The most important is that Joseph Smith did not think that way. The signal feature of his life was his sense of being guided by revelation. He experienced revelation like George Fox, the early Quaker, who heard the Spirit as “impersonal prophecy,” not from his own mind but as “a word from the Lord as the prophets and apostles had.” Joseph’s “marvilous experience,” as he called his revelations, came to him as experiential facts. Toward the end of his life, he told a Pittsburgh reporter that he could not always get a revelation when he needed one, but “he never gave anything to his people as revelation, unless it was a revelation.” To blur the distinction — to insist that Smith devised every revelation himself — obscures the very quality that made the Prophet powerful. To get inside the movement, we have to think of Smith as the early Mormons thought of him and as he thought of himself — as a revelator (xxi).
This argument — that we must treat Joseph’s visions as if they were real because Joseph experienced them as real — is rank question-begging. If in fact, Joseph was a charlatan (or a pious fraud, as Dan Vogel would have it), then we would expect him to describe his visions as, in Bushman’s words, “experiential facts.” However, it does not follow that the visions and revelations were, in Joseph’s actual lived perception, real. Using Joseph’s statements as evidence of the reality of his supernatural experiences is only valid if Joseph is assumed to have been honest about those experiences — but his honesty on that matter is precisely the topic of debate. Without his circular, question-begging argument, Bushman remains obliged either to take seriously the debate over whether historical evidence favors a view of Joseph as honest or dishonest on these issues, or at least to acknowledge that there is a serious debate on this subject but to stipulate that it falls outside the scope of the biography.
The third and biggest weakness that I see in Bushman’s life of Joseph is this: Joseph’s personality is largely absent, or at least obscured from view. Bushman offers unparalleled detail about many episodes in Joseph’s life, but the episodes in my opinion fail to cohere into a picture of the man at the center of them. It sometimes seems that Bushman is content to interpret events, foresaking completely his responsibility as a biographer to also interpret the man who is, after all, his subject. Perhaps it seemed more respectful to draw a curtain over Joseph’s personality, rather than seriously attempting to infer it from his words and deeds. But this causes serious problems for the book, which in the end seems to me to lack the vital narrative force that a more fully-rendered and lifelike protagonist might have provided.
Does Bushman, then, replace Brodie as the best available biography of Joseph Smith? In my opinion he hasn’t, producing a book that instead replaces her book’s strengths with weaknesses, even while it turns Brodie’s weaknesses into strengths.
Even though I don’t fully agree with everything you have said, I do find your arguments compelling. I do however personally feel that Bushman is considerably more accurate in almost every part of his biography as compared to Brodie. Brodie has be extensively used as ammunition by those critical of the church, I don’t feel Bushman will be used in the same context.
Interesting perspective, R.T., thanks for your views!
I agree. I think especially through his acts in the Missouri war of 1838 Joseph was going against some of the revelations. That’s not to say I see this as sufficiently problematic to say Broadie is better. But I personally found Bushman’s treatment of 1838 somewhat disappointing.
Just to add, I’m not sure I’d agree with your second and third points. I think #2 in particular couldn’t be done without turning the book into apologetics.
Don and Clark, thanks for your comments.
Don, I rather suspect that Bushman will be used against the church — and perhaps as effectively as Brodie. The Bushman biography does contain much of the material that some people find quite challenging; if those sections in particular are pointed out, in a generally church-friendly volume, they might have the credibility to create the sense of shock and feeling that things have been kept hidden which anti-Mormons try to produce. But I think it’s basically impossible to tell any serious version of Mormon history without running this risk.
Clark, I wouldn’t necessarily say that Brodie is better; just that Bushman isn’t clearly better than Brodie. I’d agree that Bushman’s treatment of 1838 was disappointing — indeed, superficial.
With respect to the second point, based on Bushman’s other “methodological” writing, I think the raw assumption that Joseph’s visions were real to him seems to have apologetic motives in any case. But the alternative of clearly signalling the existence of a debate with citations to two or three voices from each perspective and then moving on would have been intellectually fair without overwhelming the narrative. I think it’s fair to expect at least that much.
The third point is essentially literary criticism, and as such could obviously be wrong. On the other hand, I’ve found this afternoon in looking at other reviews of the book that I’m not alone in thinking that Bushman observed Joseph from rather too far of a distance…
I’m glad you posted this, RT. The bloggernacle reviews of RSR have been pretty much uniformly positive, but like you my reaction is more mixed.
My wife and I are reading the book together, and neither of us have read Brodie or any other JS biography before. It seems to me like the intended audience for Bushman’s book is Mormon intellectuals who have already read the other biographies. I often get the sense that Bushman is apologizing or justifying things without really explaining them. For example, I don’t understand what was going on with the Kirtland bank failure, nor do I understand very well the conflicts with the dissenters in Missouri. In general I don’t get much idea how Joseph’s detractors may have seen things. Sometimes I get what seems a lot like the standard correlated church story with no explanation; for example, we are told that Corrill and other dissenters “turned against” Joseph in his trial after the Missouri war, but I don’t know what this means…did they misrepresent what happened? Did they cut a crooked deal with the prosecutor? Or did they just offer a different view of the events?
I feel like I have to go read other sources to get the full story. I’ve looked at a few things online for just that; for example, Marvin Hill’s brief “Quest for Refuge” seems to fill in some of the holes Bushman leaves.
For those who have read Brodie, would you recommend it? I don’t want to read a lot of stuff that is outdated or unreliable.
RT:
You make two very serious errors in the analysis of your first point:
First, while D&C 132:61 sets forth a scenario in which a man could take multiple wives and not be considered to be an adulterer, it does not say that such a scenario (ie taking two virgins, etc.) is the *only* plural marriage scenario that would not be considered adultery. It would be ridiculous to read the passage that way.
Second, the word of wisdom was expressly NOT given “by way of commandment” in Joseph’s day. For him and the other members of the church at the time, taking a drink was simply not even a violation of a church standard, let alone a divine commandment. Perhaps unfortunately, that is not the paradigm we operate under today, but it was in Joseph’s day.
As Mark Twain said, “Get your facts straight, then distort them as much as You please.” You are going to need to come up with something better than these two straw man arguments to support your contention that Joseph was a habitual commandment breaker.
Ed, the Brodie book is, unfortunately, both outdated and somewhat unreliable. But I think you’re right; the Bushman book seems to sometimes be written specifically in respose to Brodie. Her discussion of the Kirtland banking incident, in particular, and the other dissenter episodes, more generally, would certainly fill the holes that you feel in the presentation. I also like the Hill book that you mentioned quite a lot.
Pete, your response is rather more aggressive than is necessary in the context. I’m not trying to describe Joseph as a rampant sinner; instead, I’m pointing out that Bushman’s depiction of Joseph as being fastidiously, even nit-pickingly obedient to the details of his revelations is incomplete.
In fact, the D&C 132:61 verse presents the only authorized plural marriage scenario in the polygamy revelation. Perhaps other situations would be acceptable, but if so, why are the conditions in 132:61 so forcefully and even redundantly articulated? So Joseph went specifically beyond his instructions here. I don’t know if that’s a serious sin, or indeed a sin at all; that seems to me to be a matter between Joseph, his wives, and God. But it does show a problem with Bushman’s characterization.
I also know that the Word of Wisdom wasn’t a commandment; it was council. Nonetheless, it was a revelation, so it is directly on point: Joseph didn’t always follow the revelations that were given him.
Before you respond further, please understand that I’m not trying to blacken anyone’s name here. I’m just making an argument that Bushman’s interpretation of Joseph doesn’t fully incorporate the evidence.
RT:
The three conclusions from Bushman’s bio that you claim are unsupported all reference “commandments” not simply “the details of his revelations” as you have phrased it. On that basis alone your word of wisdom example disappears. Your polygamy example is a difficult stretch, as the commandment in D&C 132 was given only a year before Joseph’s death.
In sum, if you line up all the evidence of the times Joseph followed the commandments fastidiously and the times he didn’t (arguably Martin Harris, the times in his early days before Moroni visits, and even throw in the year between D&C 132 and his martyrdom), the evidence weighs overwhelmingly in favor of Bushman’s conclusion that “Joseph ordinarily followed the commandments punctiliously, as if disobedience put him at risk.”
So what was your point again?
Pete, the D&C 132 revelation was written down a year before Joseph’s death. However, it was received substantially before that — in Kirtland, and possibly as early as 1833. Joseph explained to several different people that he hadn’t written the revelation down but that he knew it by heart. It was only written down because Hyrum encouraged Joseph to write it in order to persuade Emma of the authenticity of plural marriage. Hyrum encouraged Joseph to use his seer stones while writing it in order to avoid mistakes, but Joseph replied to him that he knew it well enough that there would be no mistakes.
You should also note that Joseph sometimes referred to all of his revelations as “commandments,” including the ones that don’t use the word. Hence “Book of Commandments” for the first collection including them. Furthermore, Bushman, in the quotes given above, used “commandment” and “revelation” interchangeably once. So obedience to the details of the revelations is the point.
On the strength of the polygamy evidence alone, it is clear that Bushman’s summary is incomplete. Clark is correct above that Joseph seemed to disobey revealed instructions during the Missouri period, as well. The Word of Wisdom examples are, I’m sure you’ll agree, minor examples of disregarding revelation — but examples nonetheless. (If you had an actual, verbal revelation telling you to avoid some foods, etc., would you completely disregard it just because it wasn’t obligatory?)
To conclude, I don’t understand why you (and Bushman) want to construct an artificially perfect Joseph Smith. Joseph didn’t atone for our sins; we don’t need him to be perfect. Making him seem perfect in domains where he wasn’t seems to run the risk of idolatry to me; perhaps you see reasons why this is worthwhile, though. I’d love to hear your explanation.
I agree with Pete in the last point. I also agree with Bushman himself, who said why try to explain the unexplainable. I think trying to be a Vogelite wannabe is not useful or necesary.
One point, though, RT, I agree with you: Bushman wasn’t able to fully flesh out the man. I think he may have done the best he could, though. A future historian will have more tools than we have now. I personally believe that many aspects of the Prophet’s life are mysteries of godliness: truths that can only be known by revelation, and even if known can’t be shared publicly.
I appreciate all that Bushman was able to do for now anyways.
Good review.
I agree with you about the polygamy thing. But I think that the Word of Wisdom is explicitly said to be counsel and not commandment (something changed as a matter of policy by Grant). I also think that when Bushman is talking about “treating” Joseph’s revelations a certain way, he’s talking about taking a certain rhetorical stance. The passage that you site is Bushman’s attempt to clarify that his rhetorical stance doesn’t imply that Joseph’s revelations were real any more than it would imply that Fox’s were. It’s analogous to Cooper’s stance on slavery in his groundbreaking bio of the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, American, where he announces up front that he will abstain from denouncing slavery at every turn, and just discuss it as the context of Davis’s life and the development of the the CSA warrant. Of course, Cooper does
not believe in slavery and Bushman does believe in Joseph’s prophetic mission, but the goal is the same; viz., keeping disclaimers from cluttering up the development of the narrative and trying to capture the immediacy of the events without constantly harassing the reader with warnings that pander to his cultural sensibilities.
Bushman’s bio may well surpass Brodie’s. He definitely surpasses Donna Hill, who is more accurate than Brodie and is able to leverage the scholarship of the 50s and 60s much more than Brodie’s revised 2nd edition, but isn’t nearly so readable and (what’s more important) just doesn’t put the “Breath of Life” into Joseph the way Brodie does. Bushman comes much closer, but I think that he falls short of Brodie in this respect–Brodie was a gutsy biographer, and this meant that she was sometimes liable to mistakes, but when she was right she really scored big (witness how much kinder history has been to her Jefferson/Hemming hypothesis than it has been to its critics), and she digs for and strikes gold when she paints her portrait of Joseph. But the substantial difference in the scholarship available since Brodie (or even, as you point out, Hill) may well make up for the gap in the vitality between Bushman’s and Brodie’s Josephs, and put Bushman on top.
I should also add that if I were to recommend one book or the other to a non-Mormon friend, it would definitely be Bushman’s. Bushman is a much less partisan biographer (which may be one reason for my preference to Brodie–I’m a sucker for the gutsy, take no prisoners approach). The way Brodie puts it, a lazy reader might think that belief in Joseph’s mission is incompatible with the facts she presents in the book.
That said, it’s worth noting that Brodie’s portrait of Joseph is what put Joseph on the map as an important figure in early 19th century America and made him into a bona fide character of historical interest. Before Brodie’s bio, among academics and lay people alike, Joseph was a real nobody–just a semi-literate plagiarist of the Spaulding manuscript and the charismatic front man for Sydney Rigdon’s genius. Even the real Mormon historians who thought highly of Joseph dealt primarily with the post Illinois/post Joseph phase of Church history. In that sense, it’s not likely that any bio of Joseph will ever be as influential as hers was.
RT, thanks for the review. A couple of my observations. While you back up point #1 with quotes the overall thought I felt Bushman was trying to convey was that Joseph strongly believed that his revelations came from God, not that he necessarily was perfect in keeping them. Like I say I appreciate that you backed your point up with actual quotes from the book, I’m just refering to the sense I got.
Secondly, I agree with your assertion “Joseph’s personality is largely absent, or at least obscured from view.” However, I don’t see that as a significant weakness. Perhaps this is my personal oddity but I didn’t read this book hoping to “know” Joseph. The phrase “no man knows my history” has always been in my head when I have felt others have tried to tell me what Joseph was like, whether good or bad. I don’t know if I’m making sense, but I kinda like they way I put Bushman’s book down and felt that Joseph was to a certain extent still unknowable.
RT:
Let us see the evidence that section 132 was written in its entirety and final form prior to 1843 . . . Minor quibbles aside, the basic problem with your first point remains:
To simply say (as Bushman does) that Joseph “ordinarily” obeyed the commandments (or revelations) he recieved is
a) supported by the great weight of the historical evidence and therefore factually accurate; and
b) not to construct “an artificially perfect Joseph Smith” as you suggest.
That JS was not “perfect” goes without saying. But the fact that you said it illustrates the straw man quality of your argument.
RT:
By the way, I agree with your third (and most important?) point, although I think Bushman’s failure on that count can be explained by a historian/biographer distinction (where the latter generally is afforded more storytelling and interpretive license).
Ironically, though, whichever side of the distinction you choose, Bushman is rightfully criticized under either your second and third point. As a historian, Bushman may fail to to adequately deal with Joseph’s revelation accounts because he has chosen instead to be a biographer with respect to those.
But as a biographer, then, Bushman fails to sufficiently bring out Joseph’s personality.
I would have liked to see more personality too.
I have not read NMKMH which makes commenting on the relative merits of the two books. Reading RSR, the only thing that really bothered me was that late in the book the line between Joseph receiving revelations from God and Joseph authoring them himself seemed to be blurred. More than once Bushman treated revelations as being a product of Joseph’s mind which struck me as inconsistent with the statement at the start of the book that revelations would be treated by the book as coming from God since that is how Joseph perceived them.
I’m pleased as punch that RT used “question begging” correctly. If only other bloggers showed similar skill…
I agree with RT in that I do wish there had been more treatment of the odd ways in which Joseph seemed to violate the revealed rules about plural marriage. If memory serves, Bushman cited the rules as a positive feature of LDS plural marriage.
The WoW thing is a nit pick and a non-issue in my mind. Anyone that has thoughtfully read Section 89 knows that not only was it explicitly not given as a commandment but that what we call the WoW today isn’t contained in that section (or any other) of the D&C.
I would have loved to see more personality. What did come through seemed to be limited to the Sylvester Smith incidents during and after Zion’s Camp.
These are all minor quibbles though. The book is wonderful and the fact that the author is both a faithful member of the church and a serious scholar will not only make this work more approachable for members who would never touch Brodie, but might also indicate to the general membership that there is no need to fear scholarship.
http://mildride.blogspot.com/ — I’d like to comment on whether or not Brodie is worth the reading …
was sometimes less than demanding of her evidence
The Brodie book is, over and over again, 180 degrees opposed to its sources. She intentionally and wilfully misused sources.
Some excerpts at http://adrr.com/living/broadie.htm
As a result, many people find a cite to Brodie to raise their hackles, as if everyone who quotes her knows, or should know, that she is extremely flexible with the truth.
That isn’t the case, but it is a gut level reaction many have.
For a more in depth analysis:
http://www2.ida.net/graphics/shirtail/noman.htm
http://www2.ida.net/graphics/shirtail/lijjick.htm
Anyway, I would have real difficulty recommending Brodie to anyone.
RT, you didn’t take my bite on my comment. Let me ask you then, is there a way that anyone can fulfill your #2, adopt a believing position, and not be taken to be engaging in apologetics?
I do agree that Bushman could have perhaps presented the two opposing views. Although to be fair I think he typically did that - only with at best a sentence or two. I didn’t mind that. But if he was to engage into those issues more would be necessary.
I guess I just can’t see him engaging with the issues without being then labeled (and discounted) as a mere apologist. Heavens, even with his restrained tone he still was accused of being an apologists.
I know some, as you point out, suggest that his “non-position” is itself an apologetic position. That is, ignoring the issue of whether Joseph actually had these manifestations and just assuming his word that he believed them. Perhaps this is the underlying issue. Brodie (and Vogel) attempt to get into Joseph’s mind. Bushman doesn’t. Particularly with Broadie this leads to the psychohistory charge. People want to know what’s going in the guy’s head. And for a controversial figure like Joseph, this is even more attractive. But I return to my original point. Can anyone write as a believer and do this in a way that won’t be simply discounted?
That is, isn’t the floor tilted extremely towards debunkers, skeptics and people seeing the worst?
RT: I agree with a lot of what you have written here. I would only make two points:
1. I think that Bushman’s discussion with reference to Joseph’s attitude toward the revelations had more to do with his rhetorical attitude toward them rather than the details of his actions. Bushman actually wrote an essay on the rhetoric and voice of Joseph’s revelation, and the discussion in RSR struck me as basically duplicative of that essay.
2. I think that visions are less problematic than the Book of Mormon. I don’t think that anyone really cares if Joseph really had a vision, and I think that most Gentile readers without a theological ax to grind are fine with presenting the narratives without psychologizing, much the way that non-Muslim narratives of Muhammed’s life are presented. Indeed, I think that this focuse on the veracity of the visionary stories is one of the reasons that Vogel’s book isn’t — and will not become — really visible outside of Mormon circules. On the other hand, I do think that Bushman’s approach becomes more problematic for the Book of Mormon which cries out for a 19th-century interepretation. In fairness, Bushman does cite to the critical literature in his notes. He just doesn’t engage it.
3. I think that RT and DKL are right about that Bushman’s Joseph doesn’t leap off of the page as a character. In the end, however, I think that this has less to do with the religious ideology of Bushman’s book than with the fact that he is a professional historian in a way that Brodie never was. Brodie can offer a compelling portrait precisely because she could “intuit” motives and thoughts without being hampered by the need to document them. Bushman is more anal, which is one of the reasons that I suspect his book will age better.
OK. 3 points.
For better or worse, I always thought Truman Madsen’s portrayal of Joseph Smith character the best. Of course its not a history. And many would attack it. But is it really much worse than Broadie’s?
But one does wish Bushman had channelled at least a bit more Broadie or Madsen. That is to give at least a bit more taste of who Joseph was instead of what he did and experienced.
Clark: I had never really thought of Madsen in these terms, but you are right that he does provide a very appealing portrait of Joseph’s character. The problem is not only his sourcing (heavy reliance on Utah-era antecdotes) but also that he never really places his Joseph within the narrative of events, so we have a difficult time seeing if it has the apparent explanatory power of Brodie’s cheerful and libidinous fraud.
Clark said: “…That is, isn’t the floor tilted extremely towards debunkers, skeptics and people seeing the worst?”
I’ll take a stab:
The believer bears the burden of proof, especially where supernatural explanations exist. But I agree with what I think you are hinting at: Apologist is an unnecessarily loaded and dismissive term. Bushman, as balanced as he may try to be, is not adopting the materialist worldview. (To some degree his side-step on this point is more honest, in my opinion, than frequent works in Mormon apologetics that are argued in a materialist fashion but don’t own up to the rules of that worldview, for example, in burdens of proof.) The position Bushman has taken us not favored by materialists, the dominant intellectual position of most scholars. But that doesn’t mean his position is unworthwhile. It just means that his work is largely unpersuasive except to those who are inclined already to believe or give some romantic deference to that interpretation.
###
On another point:
I’m also inclined to be persuaded by RT’s contention #3 as being very valid. I often didn’t find it clear whether Bushman is a biographer or a historian in his treatment of the material. If a biographer, I wish I would have felt I understood Joseph’s character better, even if it had a very faithful bias. (To me Bushman’s Joseph is just a tad too luke-warm, though in fairness this may be as daring as Mormon culture can permit in its slow evolution of bringing moderation toward the vainglorious concept of prophethood.) If a historian I found Bushman’s discourse unnecessarily tame or shallow on some very germane points.
I’ll confess my bias is to find non-supernatural explanations to the events of Joseph’s life most reasonable and persuasive–though that needn’t be seen as mean-spirited or bent toward “seeing the worst.”
Brodie, the entertainer, never hesitated to let things such as “evidence” or “documentation” get in the way of her searching look into the innermost soul of Joseph Smith–a search that revealed, surprise, that he had no soul. This fantastic adventure, comprising the entirety of her great literary novel, is positively engaging. Bushman, however, is a scholar, and as such he recognizes that while mind-reading is fascinating, it isn’t history. Thank goodness someone finally wrote a reliable, fact-based book about Joseph Smith. If I wanted to know secret thoughts or undocumented motives, I’d visit a palm reader– or read NMKMH. With all the skewed nonsense written on Joseph Smith through the years (both ways, I’m afraid), revealing to the reader an interpretation of his character is a dime-a-dozen compared to presenting solid, documented, uncolored facts, which Bushman does extremely well. I will, however, keep Brodie’s book on hand in case I ever run out of reader’s digest magazines.
John17,
The thing about Brodie is that she was more-or-less right a lot of the time — and when she was wrong, she was wrong productively. The scholarship clarifying her exaggerations and errors is, well, most of the scholarship that Bushman is able to draw on. Is Bushman’s book similarly productive? Does he open up major new avenues of research?
Are you asking if Bushman was wildy wrong enough to spark other people to do actual scholarship to fix his obvious blunders? No, I guess, in that case I don’t think he was as “productive” as Brodie.
I second Nate (comment #18), aren’t we comparing apples and oranges? I understand the comparison b/c there aren’t that many books that take up Joseph Smith as comprehensively as these two books, so they are both read by intelligentsia—but I think the similarity ends there. Can Brodie’s book really be taken as a serious academic work? That, as I think Bushman has explicitly stated, is the main difference between the books. (By the way, I would view Compton’s book as somewhere in between, but since I haven’t read it very carefully, I’m curious if others would agree….)
Wow, I really don’t like “academic” as my word choice above. Let retreat to just saying Bushman seems to be trying to be much more careful by not doing the psychologizing that Brodie does, so I think it’s sort of missing the mark to compare them in the way RT does….
Robert, I understand your comparison. However, I think that trying to understand the subject (which is a less pejorative way of saying “psychologizing”) is a basic responsibility of successful biography. Bushman’s decision, in effect, not to try to understand Joseph seems to be a major failure of the book within the genre of biography.
RT: I think that you are being a bit too harsh on Bushman. He does try to understand Joseph; in particular he tries very hard to understand both Joseph’s internal spiritual life and his religious thought. Brodie basically thought that both of these things were non-existent and therefore didn’t try to understand them. Bushman will be productive to the extent that he is able to give Joseph the status of a religious thinker whose theology must be examined rather than joked about. Furthermore, his attempt to understand Joseph’s spirituality has an advantage over Brodie’s psychologizing in that it is based on actual documents.
One of the real issues here is what do you do when you have a paucity of sources. We have lots and lots and lots of stuff written by other people about what they think Joseph was thinking. We have very little from Joseph saying what he was thinking. There is no Joseph Smith source, for example, analogous to the self-revealing diaries and letters of John Adams.
Brodie’s response to this paucity was to make up (or intuit if you like) an internal mental world for Joseph Smith. Bushman’s response is to look at Joseph Smith’s world and try to understand the context of his actions. Ultimately Brodie’s approach is a deadend because there is no way of verifying her pyschological conclusions on anything other than aesthetic grounds. Bushman’s paradigm is a bit more plodding, but it offers the possiblity of real progress in our understanding in that it points to an area where we actually have sources.
A final issue is the extent to which it is ethical for a biographer to in effect say, “I don’t know.” Bushman is willing to say this. Brodie is not.
Nate, I think we have an obvious difference of opinions here, based in large part in what we think biographers ought to do. Such differences are probably not ultimately enlightening, so I’m not going to try to argue in favor of my point of view. (For example, I think Joseph’s spirituality is no more directly accessible than his psychology, and that understanding the former requires suppositions about the latter. But you clearly think that Joseph’s spirituality is more directly accessible via primary sources. Okay, there we are… It’s not a conversation that leads to an excess of interesting ideas…)
However, there’s one point on which, I think, you’re somewhat mistaken. You say that “Brodie’s approach is a dead end,” but in fact Brodie’s hypotheses set the research agenda for a significant portion of the New Mormon History. Bushman, by contrast, doesn’t really raise significant new issues or set a major agenda in the way Brodie did. Indeed, Bushman doesn’t even present major new information or interpretations, instead drawing heavily on existing findings (drawn heavily from research within the tradition founded, ironically enough, by Brodie). Overall, the book feels more like an attempt at winding down a research agenda than an effort that opens up new possibilities for progress.
Montessori Kindergarten…
Sie wurde von der Universität Amsterdam mit dem Ehrendoktor und als außerordentliche Hochschulprofessorin gewürdigt und mit dem Orden von Oranien und Nassau ausgezeichnet….