Dale L. Morgan: Mormon and Western Histories in Transition

Richard L. Saunders'sDale L. Morgan: Mormon and Western Histories in Transition is the first biography of historian Dale Morgan, a specialist in Mormon and Western history whose publications span the late 1930s to the mid-1970s. Having published on and edited volumes by Dale Morgan for decades, Saunders, a librarian at Southern Utah University, has extensive knowledge of his subject. Writing Morgan's biography therefore seems to have been a logical endeavor, albeit one that “required thirty years of [his] own lifetime” (xvii). Saunders is to be praised for his achievement, if only for the number of documents he had to go through and absorb to produce his compelling 430-page biography. The book also includes a twenty-page “Dale L. Morgan Bibliography,” updated from one of Saunders's earlier works, and photographs documenting Morgan's life and career.Saunders divides his biography of Morgan into three parts. Not only are these chronological, but they also reflect Morgan's evolution as a historian. The first part covers the first three decades of Morgan's life, from his birth in Salt Lake City in 1914 to his Guggenheim Fellowship–funded travel to gather material for a book on the Mormons. The third part, from the mid-1950s to his death in 1971, focuses on Morgan's interest in the history of the American West. The middle section, which covers a relatively short period from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, traces this shift of interest from Mormon to Western history during a period in Morgan's life marked by job precariousness, financial hardship, and geographical instability.The book's primary focus is Morgan's career as a historian and how he adapted to the social and intellectual context of his time. Yet thanks to a massive correspondence of more than “twenty-two thousand letters” (2; emphasis in the original), Saunders gives a clear picture of Morgan's personal life. Specific episodes receive a vivid presentation. Among other examples, the pages about Morgan becoming deaf and his difficulties adjusting to his new life while still in the throes of adolescence are very gripping. The episode also sheds light on Morgan's reliance on the written word throughout his life, first as a fiction writer and then mostly as a historian.Morgan's career in history started in 1938 when he joined the Utah branch of the Historical Records Survey, a project of the Works Progress Administration. The branch's mission was to identify and index public records that documented Utah's history. Morgan was young, inexperienced, and not academically trained. None of this prevented him from being critical of Utah's academic historians. Indeed, he reproached them for accepting at face value the Mormon master narrative, thereby serving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ cause instead of applying proper methodologies, research tools, and critical thinking.To Morgan, “the pursuit of history was strictly a quest for objective empiricism” (184). In other words, he considered getting the facts right sufficient to ensure their proper interpretation. As Saunders points out, this perspective is hard to reconcile with the study of a religious movement and the central place of faith in its practitioners’ lives. Morgan's conviction that “studying facts allowed him to see into hearts and minds” (185) contrasts with some of his contemporaries’ use of psychological methods to look at the past. In 1927 Henry Steele Commager had already highlighted “that combination of physical and spiritual experience which is the very warp and woof of American history.”1 The case was already strong by the time Henry Nash Smith published Virgin Land, The American West as Symbol and Myth in 1950.2Beyond his obvious precociousness, Morgan seems to have been impervious to the numerous changes taking place around him. His conception of history, historical research, and historical writing does not seem to have evolved much throughout his career. Nor did he change his mind regarding academic training while higher education was developing quickly. With droves of newly minted PhDs flooding the job market, Morgan remained convinced that a degree did not matter as much as one's reputation. Yet he did not find any financial and job stability until 1956, at forty-two years old, when his part-time employment at the Bancroft Library was transformed into a full-time job, the first and only one he ever had.Saunders charts Morgan's many research and book projects—some of them carried out simultaneously—while either working or looking for work to sustain himself and, at the same time, maintaining correspondence with numerous family and friends. The central part of the book, most particularly, feels like a whirlwind: Morgan was desperate to land a job that would allow him time and financial stability to pursue his research and writing projects; he moved numerous times across the country; took on several research projects, then failed to meet publication deadlines; and, ultimately, had his Mormon book contract canceled.Saunders's biography of Morgan conveys the image of an indefatigable researcher tracking down, cataloguing, and compiling primary sources; a generous and erudite man helping younger historians and friends with their own research, providing them with material and/or mentoring advice; and a relentless writer, relying on the written word to compensate for his deafness and related speech difficulties.Central to Saunders's biography of Dale Morgan is the notion of “transition.” Being as much a testimony of an individual's life as an assessment of the context that serves as the backdrop to this life, a biography necessarily attests to evolutions and transformations, be they political, social, economic, or intellectual. Saunders aptly accounts for these changes.For example, the discipline of history experienced significant changes between the beginning of Morgan's career as a historian in the late 1930s and his death in 1971. Morgan learned his craft while working for the Utah Writers’ Project, but by the time he was employed by the Bancroft Library, starting in 1954, historians were primarily trained professional academics and scholars with graduate degrees. They asked different questions about the past, relied on more varied methods, looked for new types of sources, sought to interpret rather than describe the past for patriotic purposes, and came up with revised accounts. Even though “Morgan was an outstanding scholar in his field” (361), he was one of the last amateur historians in a world of professionals.This was particularly true in the realm of Western history. Frederick Jackson Turner, who had “established himself as the first of the great professionals,” trained students who became eminent historians and professors, perpetuating Turner's ideas through their teaching and textbook writing.3 Morgan did not have Turner's academic credentials, which made his legacy more challenging to cement.This did not prevent him from contributing to the discipline, especially with his biography of American fur trapper, trader, and explorer Jedediah Smith. Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West (1953) is still considered “one of the classics of scholarly literature on the American West” (314). Despite the book's success, especially in its paperback edition, Saunders notes that “by the 2010s Morgan and his work all but disappeared from the ranks of the profession” (424). This may be due, in part, to Morgan's affinity for antiquarianism, privileging the precision of facts over the pursuit of meaning and significance. With his insatiable search for archival documents, Morgan failed to heed the contemporary relevance of past events. Turner had best summarized the difference between the antiquarian and the historian close to fifty years before Morgan launched his career: “The antiquarian strives to bring back the past for the sake of the past; the historian strives to show the present to itself by revealing its origin from the past. The goal of the antiquarian is the dead past; the goal of the historian is the living present.”4The fact that Morgan published two other mass-market books could have contributed to a longer-lasting imprint. Yet the publishing world also underwent significant transformations during Morgan's career, especially after the Second World War. The rise of self-help and how-to books, the development of corporate trade publishing, and the proliferation of university presses made it harder for a historian like Morgan to earn a living writing the kind of books he wanted to write.Mormon history itself was evolving, and Saunders's biography of Morgan successfully sheds light on its “transitional writers, those who existed between the polemics of the nineteenth century and the detached scholasticism of the late twentieth” (7). Morgan was a member of that generation. While working for the Utah branch of the Historical Records Survey, he valued—and learned much from—the documentary history that was then promoted by the New Deal program. Most significantly, he severely criticized the Mormon history written by historians for being hardly distinguishable from church doctrine. In Morgan's own words, this history was “worthless,” having “neither historical nor biographical validity” (80). Along with other historical writers of his generation, Morgan aimed to set the record straight.His State of Deseret, published in 1940, is described by Saunders as “arguably the first work of scholarship on the Mormons that met modern standards” (430). The lengthy introduction contextualizing Utah's earliest settlement and its political organization proved that, despite his young age (twenty-five) and his lack of academic training in history, Morgan was well-equipped to handle primary sources and produce “interpretation to fit the evidence” (116) rather than the Mormon master narrative.At twenty-seven and undaunted by the magnitude and challenge of his project, Morgan decided to write a history of Mormonism because “I believe that I am fortunate enough to have the equipment. I have an emotional understanding of Mormonism, and also an intellectual detachment essential to the critical appraisal of it” (134). Morgan meant for this book to “have serious claims to definitiveness” (133). Ambitious and determined, he left for Washington, DC, in 1942 “to see what the Mormon people, and Utah, look like from the vantage point of another culture in another environment” (135).Even though Morgan never completed his book on Mormons, which he thought would be “the best book that it is in me to write” (164), his contribution to Mormon history and historiography is undeniable. Fawn Brodie's No Man Knows My History and Juanita Brooks's Mountain Meadows Massacre would not have had the impact they had in (re)shaping Mormon history without Morgan's active involvement as commentator, critic, and mentor.5 Their generation may have preceded the “New Mormon History,” but Brodie and Brooks, along with Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto, among others, paved the way for it, with Morgan acting as facilitator and connector.Finally, Saunders presents his own work as transitional. His book is the first biography of Morgan, and Saunders's meticulous sifting through and piecing together Morgan's papers is very impressive. The biographer also acknowledges previous works on the historian he considers lacking, aiming to set the record straight. Yet his stated ambition is not to write the ultimate biography of Morgan but, instead, “to clear and outline a temporal path for Dale Morgan's subsequent biographers who will craft their works around different themes” (8). Considering the wealth of information this biography contains, one can imagine future books and articles developing specific aspects of Morgan's life and/or publications. Saunders deserves praise for forcefully contextualizing and writing a balanced and nuanced account of a rich and complex life and career. His book will be of interest to students as well as general readers with an interest in Mormon and/or Western history.