40 years ago today - Aug 2, 1979-Thursday

[Leonard Arrington]
I told Elder Durham that I had been told by a friend that the Utah Historical Society will publish in the winter 1980 issue an article by Carmen Hardy and Vic Jorgensen on the developments after the Manifesto-polygamous marriages, etc. I told him that while we might wish that this matter be kept quiet, it is an obvious subject for someone to treat and on the basis of a hurried reading I could report to him five things: a. The article is responsibly written and therefore written with as little anti-Mormon stance as possible. b. The article is better from a Church standpoint than almost any other person would have written it. c. While the article does use some material from the Church Archives, virtually all of it could have been written from other archives. d. By and large, their evidence comes from materials in the Utah State Historical Society and University of Utah collections. There is no explicit mention of thanks for the assistance of persons in the Historical Department-no mention of my name or of Davis [Bitton]'s name or of the Historical Department in general. In other words, they have not painted us with the brush of sensationalism in making this material available to them.

Elder Durham seemed to be reassured to this extent; said he recognized that there would be some of the Brethren who would not welcome it, but that the main thing was that it did not involve us or give implication that we had endorsed it.

[Confessions of a Mormon historian : the diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971-1997, Gary James Bergera, editor, Signature Books, 2018]

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please Enter your Comment: