The Power of Good Historiography: Or, How Joseph Fielding Smith Unwittingly Undermined Joseph Fielding Smith

I’m deep in my third (and final, I hope) dissertation chapter, covering the period 1960-1980. My research has always included archival work, interviews, and just generally pulling on every thread I can until the sweater unravels.

History is not merely what happened, but the stories we tell about what happened and how we tell them. Better understanding of the past can change our perception of the present, change our choices and understandings. Better history seems to have been a factor leading up to the 1978 revelation re: the priesthood/temple ban, for example. (See the long version of the Kimball biography.)

It’s also definitely the case with the Church and biological evolution. Joseph Fielding Smith told the story of evolution in the Church in the first half century in a particular way. And funny enough, it is Joseph Fielding Smith who ultimately undermines the very story he tells, leaving us instead a history that allowing much more theological openness to evolution.

Two examples

First, Smith claimed that the 1909 First Presidency statement established a clear doctrinal line against evolution. This is not the case, and my lengthy argument will, I hope,  be in print.

Second, Smith claimed that James E. Talmage’s speech Earth and Man, published by the Church as a pamphlet and widely distributed by the tens of thousands, had been unauthorized.  Earth and Man provided a strong public counter-balance to one of Smith’s talks a year earlier in The Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine; Talmage, being an Apostle and a PhD in Geology, spoke forcefully about an old earth, animals living and dying for millions of years before Adam, and that the Church accepted scientific conclusions. This was necessary because  in his article, Smith had expressed his paradigm that scripture should control scientific interpretation.

President Smith in 1910

There was no death in the earth before the fall of Adam. I do not care what the scientists say¹Italics in original. My underlining in regard to dinosaurs and other creatures upon  the earth millions of years ago that lived and died and fought and struggled for existence.

Other Church leaders were quite concerned about this paradigm and Smith’s expression of it, as LDS young adults at the time saw science-religion conflict as one of the top serious issues of their day. Smith’s expression was not only unhelpful, it was wrong. Talmage’s talk and pamphlet a year later was a direct rebuttal.

Talmage spoke at length of the scriptural account of man and creation and science.

A young Talmage.

The Creator has made record in the rocks for man to decipher; but he has also spoken directly regarding the main stages of progress by which the earth has been brought to be what it is. The accounts cannot be fundamentally opposed; one cannot contradict the other; though man’s interpretation of either may be seriously at fault.

Human factors were present in science and scripture, not merely science as Smith claimed. Talmage went on.

 We have a vast and ever-increasing volume of knowledge concerning early²Talmage crossed this out in his draft. Too inflammatory? man… about which such scriptures as we have thus far received are entirely silent. Let us not try to wrest the scriptures in an attempt to explain away what we can not explain. The opening chapters of Genesis, and scriptures related thereto [i.e. the Pearl of Great Price] were never intended as a text-book of geology, archeology, earth-science, or man-science…. We do not show reverence for the scriptures when we misapply them through faulty interpretation.

Talmage strongly implied that Smith engaged in “faulty interpretation” when he read scripture as providing scientific information, reliable or not.

Side note: Along those lines, President J. Reuben Clark would add his own Talmage-related experience. He had served as Talmage’s science assistant for several years. In a letter to John Widtsoe about Talmage’s son Sterling— also a Geology PhD— Clark wrote,

Dr. James E. said “the Bible was not written as a textbook on geology or biology.” I might add that neither was the Pearl of Great Price.

Earth and Man continued.

Throughout those ages of preparation, to us unmeasured and unmeasurable, countless generations of plants and animals, in great variety and profusion, lived and died… the earliest rocks thus far identified… revealed the fossilized remains of once living organisms, plant and animal…. These lived and died, age after age, while the earth was yet unfit for human habitation.

Talmage’s widely-published talk— tens of thousands of pamphlets distributed,  reprinted in the Church’s British magazine, and translated into German— served as a direct counter-balance to Smith’s explicit claims and implicit paradigm of the relationship between science and scripture.  Smith’s response? He wrote “false doctrine” across his copy of the pamphlet.

Smith later claimed that Earth and Man had been published on Talmage’s own authority, even against the will of the First Presidency and Quorum.  For example, this expression in a private 1953 letter from Smith.

No doubt [Earth and Man] is a sweet morsel to the evolutionists, who are keeping it alive, but it never has received the sanction, or approval, of the First Presidency and Apostles.

However, the contemporary journals of President Grant and Talmage demonstrate that he indeed published it with full knowledge, approval, and recommended changes from the Apostles. We also have other contemporary sources supporting this. For example, Talmage’s daughter Elsie Talmage Brandley was an associate editor of The Improvement Era. She wrote in a letter

 I boiled when I read this, honestly, because I knew that Father’s “Earth and Man” was the approved statement on the matter; Dr. Widtsoe tells me they sent the mss clear to England for approval so it would be unanimous.

We have those Widtsoe letters, too.

As it turns out, Talmage’s views had majority support, against Smith. With dismay and surprise, Talmage noted “the insistence on the part of three of our brethren… that all geologists and geology are wrong in matters relating to the sequence of the earth.”^⁠ Thanks to Susa Young Gates, we know who they were. Only “Rudger [Clawson], David O. [McKay], and George Albert [Smith]” aligned with Joseph Fielding, but “Reed [Smoot] and the others go across the way”^⁠ i.e. in support of Talmage. And of course, McKay later changed his mind. Link 1, and link 2.

Thus, later letters claiming Talmage was completely on his own when he published are both wrong and anomalous.³The longest discussion of the First Presidency letter to Sterling Talmage is by the editors of his posthumous book,  Can Science Be Faith Promoting, lvi-lix.

Now, to return to my larger point. How do we have this history today undermining Smith’s claims? Well, largely thanks to Smith himself. Here’s the story as I understand it from archival sources, published sources, and interviews.

LDS historian-in-training Kenneth Godfrey took a graduate summer seminar in which the professor said,

“you’ll all be able to pick your [paper] subject except for you, Godfrey. You can’t. I want to see you after class.” So after class I went up to him and asked him what he wanted, and he said, “I want you to write a paper on the history of black members of the Church and the priesthood. If you want to get a grade out of this class, that’s what you will write on.” [Godfrey wrote the paper] Later, Lester Bush told me that he had seen that paper in the BYU Library, and it motivated him to write his famous treatment of blacks and the priesthood that appeared in Dialogue and won an award. I was part of the motivation for his writing that excellent piece”
-Source

While doing the research for that paper in the Church archives, Godfrey noticed a series of boxes labeled “Nauvoo correspondence.” Thinking that might possibly be relevant to the history of the ban, Godfrey inquired. The archivist told him those boxes were off-limits, because they weren’t catalogued and no one knew what was in them. Godfrey at the time shared an office with Hoyt Brewster, Joseph Fielding Smith’s grandson. In talking about his research, Brewster proposed getting permission from Grampa Smith, and Smith granted it!  Source Among other things, when Godfrey went through the boxes, he found many of the original documents pertaining to the 1930-31 Smith/Roberts/Talmage debate, discussed above. These were almost completely unknown to the public.

Well, Godfrey went off to California, where he encountered a graduate student in the sciences named Duane Jeffery, a history enthusiast, particularly around issues of the Church and evolution. Hearing about these original documents which changed the public story, Jeffery became quite interested. By the time Jeffery hired on at BYU to teach evolutionary biology and genetics c. 1970, he had acquired a significant collection of transcripts, bad photocopies, and descriptions of sources. He sometimes distributed these to students who asked; in 1974, he published his famous article about the Church’s history with evolution, which undercut claims that the Church had always been staunchly opposed at every level.

Prior to publication, Jeffery had the paper read by

over two dozen scholars… [including] several [who were] not sympathetic with the basic message of the article, and they were specifically requested to point out any errors they could. None of them could do so.

Lastly, Jeffery had the paper “reviewed and ‘cleared’ by the Church’s historian, Dr. Leonard Arrington.”^⁠

Now, Arrington probably knew the primary documents and data Jeffery marshaled, because he himself had hired a Harvard graduate student to do summer research on the topic in the closed Church archives.^⁠ Richard Sherlock’s research there extended beyond evolution to the connected topic of “the reaction of Mormons in the 20th century to modern Biblical criticism.”^⁠ Sherlock produced an internal paper, “The Controversy over Evolution and Science in LDS History”^⁠ with over 200 footnotes, citing many sources unavailable to the public. From 1978 onwards, Sherlock spun off four publications from this research, treating the so-called 1911 crisis at BYU,^⁠ LDS reactions to Darwin’s legacy,^⁠  the scriptural clash between Heber C. Snell and Joseph Fielding Smith in the 1950s and 60s,^⁠ and the 1931 Roberts-Smith-Talmage affair.⁴This was followed by Jeffrey E. Keller “Discussion Continued: The Sequel to the Roberts/Smith/Talmage Affair” Dialogue 15:1 (Spring 1982), 79-98

So when Arrington read Jeffery’s paper, he probably knew  the topic and sources because of Sherlock’s research. And why did Jeffery know about these sources? Because Joseph Fielding Smith had given permission to Kenneth Godfrey to go digging.

Now, to conclude, another story. History is a powerful thing. It changes minds and opens doors. I spoke with a friend who was a BYU student in 2004. All he’d been taught was that the Church had always been completely opposed: the earth was young, and there was no death before the fall, ergo no room or time for evolution’s mechanisms to function. He was taught this at BYU, by his Religion professor who moreover taught him the evolutionary biologists were apostates.  But then he happened into a lecture by a professor who knew the history better and had his mind blown. He came away saying, “if the history isn’t as one-sided as has been claimed, then I can make up my own mind.” Indeed. The history is not nearly so one-sided, and the Gospel is compatible.

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