BYU Studies Quarterly Volume 58 Number 2 (2019)

Editor in Chief Steven C. Harper Associate Editor Susan Elizabeth Howe Involving Readers Editorial Board in the Latter-day Saint Trevor Alvord media Academic Experience Richard E. Bennett Church history Carter Charles history W. Justin Dyer social science Dirk A. Elzinga linguistics Sherilyn Farnes history James E. Faulconer philosophy/theology Kathleen Flake religious studies Ignacio M. Garcia history Daryl R. Hague translation David F. Holland religious history Kent P. Jackson scripture Megan Sanborn Jones theater and media arts Ann Laemmlen Lewis independent scholar Kerry Muhlestein Egyptology Armand L. Mauss sociology Marjorie Newton history Josh E. Probert material culture Susan Sessions Rugh history Herman du Toit visual arts Lisa Olsen Tait history John G. Turner history Gerrit van Dyk library science John W. Welch law and scripture Frederick G. Williams cultural history Jed L. Woodworth history STUDIES QUARTERLY BYU Vol. 58 • No. 2 • 2019 ARTICLES 4 Pilgrimage to Palmyra: President B. H. Roberts and the Eastern States Mission’s 1923 Commemoration of Cumorah Reid L. Neilson and Carson V. Teuscher 53 “You Had Better Let Mrs Young Have Any Thing She Wants”: What a Joseph Smith Pay Order Teaches about the Plight of Missionary Wives in the Early Church Matthew C. Godfrey 87 Is Not This Real? Joseph M. Spencer 113 The Nauvoo Temple Bells Shannon M. Tracy, Glen M. Leonard, and Ronald G. Watt 171 Brigham Young’s Newly Located February 1874 Revelation Christopher James Blythe DOCUMENT 105 The Day Joseph Smith Was Killed: A Carthage Woman’s Perspective Alex D. Smith ESSAYS 44 Rod Tip Up! Clark S. Monson 69 The Bread of Life, with Chocolate Chips Samuel Morris Brown 81 Agency and Same-Sex Attraction Ben Schilaty COVER ART 176 Ed’s Slot, Provo River Jan Perkins POETRY 80 Winter Rail Yard Matthew Scott Stenson 86 The Creator Praises Birds J. S. Absher BOOK REVIEWS 177 The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church by Jana Riess Reviewed by Stephen Cranney 184 On Fire in Baltimore: Black Mormon Women and Conversion in a Raging City by Laura Rutter Strickling Reviewed by Rachel Cope 187 Martyrs in Mexico: A Mormon Story of Revolution and Redemption by F. LaMond Tullis Reviewed by Ignacio M. García and Cindy Gonzalez 192 The Parables of Jesus: Revealing the Plan of Salvation by John W. Welch and Jeannie Welch; artwork by Jorge Cocco Santangelo Reviewed by Micah Christensen 198 Revelations and Translations, Volume 4: Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts, facsimile edition, edited by Robin Scott Jensen and Brian M. Hauglid Reviewed by Thomas A. Wayment 202 Joseph Paul Vorst by Glen Nelson Reviewed by Herman du Toit BOOK NOTICES 206 Utah and the American Civil War: The Written Record The Expanded Canon: Perspectives on Mormonism and Sacred Texts Moramona: The Mormons in Hawai‘i, second edition Centennial service on top of the Hill Cumorah, Manchester, New York, September 22, 1923. Cour- tesy Church History Library (CHL). Pilgrimage to Palmyra President B. H. Roberts and the Eastern States Mission’s 1923 Commemoration of Cumorah Reid L. Neilson and Carson V. Teuscher he arrival of autumn in 1923 brought more than a mature harvest to Tthe quiet farming village of Palmyra, New York. On a late September weekend, a torrent of visitors flooded the township—a spectacle unlike anything the locals had ever seen. “Trudging along the roads leading into Palmyra today there came a small army of pilgrims,” the local Roch- ester Herald reported, “each with his pilgrim’s scrip and each wearing slung across his shoulders a banner with the cryptic word ‘Cumorah’ blazoned on it.” Befuddled residents witnessed the young male and female pilgrims arrive—two by two—until they eventually coalesced in large groups around the old Joseph Smith family farm. Some of the travelers were exhausted, having walked hundreds of miles to get there.1 On September 21, 1923, every elder and sister serving in the East- ern States Mission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints converged on Palmyra for an unprecedented weekend conference. Meandering down country roads until they arrived at a nondescript hill, they were joined by local Church members living across the East Coast and curious passers-by. President Heber J. Grant, accompanied by Apostles Rudger Clawson, James E. Talmage, and Joseph Fielding Smith, attended from Church headquarters in Salt Lake City.2 Over the next several days, the sleepy township teemed with enthusiastic Latter-day 1. Staff correspondent, “Pilgrims at Birthplace of Religion,” Rochester (NY) Herald, September 22, 1923, 3. 2. “Mormon Head Prominent at Celebration,” Rochester Herald, Septem- ber 22, 1923. BYU Studies Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2019) 5 6 v BYU Studies Quarterly Arrival of the Eastern States Mission elders at the Smith farm, Manchester, New York, September 21, 1923. Courtesy CHL. Saints eager to commemorate the centennial of an event that took place on that selfsame hill one hundred years earlier in 1823. Joseph Smith, the religion’s first prophet, grew up near the hill in Upstate New York. In his published personal history, he wrote: “Conve- nient to the village of Manchester, Ontario county, New York, stands a hill of considerable size, and the most elevated of any in the neighbor- hood” (JS–H 1:51). Starting on the night of September 21, 1823, Smith, then age seventeen, was visited several times by the angelic messenger Moroni, who instructed him to climb the glacial drumlin, which he called Cumorah (JS–H 1:29–50). There he uncovered “the plates, depos- ited in a stone box” obscured by a large stone on the hill’s western side (JS–H 1:51). Following the angel’s direction, Smith returned to the hill on the same date in the ensuing years, and in 1827, having been sufficiently instructed, he removed the plates from Cumorah and initiated their translation process (JS–H 1:53–54, 59). From September 21 to September 24, 1923, the hill served as the set- ting for a commemoration of Smith’s vision of Moroni and receiving the golden plates. As the brainchild of Mission President Brigham Henry Pilgrimage to Palmyra V 7 “B. H.” Roberts, the 1923 general conference of the Eastern States Mission replanted Cumorah into the historical consciousness of the general body of Church member- ship; for the first time on a large scale, Church leaders, missionar- ies, and members converged on a site purposely envisioned as an LDS center of pilgrimage and commemoration, whereas before it had served as an irregular reminder to occasional tourists of the Church’s bygone presence in New York. The centennial conference’s proceed- ings reinforced the Hill Cumorah’s Brigham H. “B. H.” Roberts, President centrality to the emergence of the of the Eastern States Mission, c. 1922. Latter-day Saint movement in the Courtesy CHL. nineteenth century and its unique theological message. Historians have made much of the period between 1890 and 1930, characterizing it as a time of transition and identity renegotiation for the Latter-day Saint faith.3 Several scholars have postulated that Church leaders, grappling with an identity vacuum in the wake of polygamy, spent the early twentieth century adopting a new image—one in greater harmony with the trappings of modern American society.4 This process of representation involved a public forgetting of the distinctiveness of the last half-century, beginning with Joseph Smith’s introduction of plu- ral marriage, instead marking a return to the earliest seeds of the Resto- ration. Those seeds—founded upon Joseph Smith’s upbringing in New York and the emergence of the Book of Mormon as the Church’s unique scriptural heritage—were on full display at the Cumorah Centennial. 3. For example, see Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A His- tory of the Latter-day Saints, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986). On the Smith family farm in particular, see Keith A. Erekson, “From Missionary Resort to Memorial Farm: Commemoration and Capitalism at the Birthplace of Joseph Smith, 1905–1925,” Mormon Historical Studies (2005): 69–100. 4. Kathleen Flake, “Re-placing Memory: Latter-day Saint Use of Histori- cal Monuments and Narrative in the Early Twentieth Century,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 13, no. 1 (Winter 2003) 69–109. 8 v BYU Studies Quarterly There, Latter-day Saint identity renegotiation involved not only a return to the foundational doctrines of Joseph Smith’s early restoration of Christ’s church, but it also involved a pilgrimage to its foundational site, a sacred place where ancient and modern prophets met.5 Replanting twentieth-century Latter-day Saint identity within the geographic bounds of its nineteenth-century origin story, the 1923 Cumorah commemoration foreshadowed a day when Church theology would be grounded first in the Book of Mormon and second in the Bible. Research has recently been focused on ways mission presidents of the early twentieth century innovated new proselyting efforts focused on the Book of Mormon—subsequently pushing it to the forefront of Church culture.6 Most studies, however, overlook Roberts’s intellectual orchestration of the 1923 summer missionary labors, which he called “country work,” and the September march to Cumorah as constituent pillars of this broader push to renegotiate Latter-day Saint identity in the early twentieth century. Instead, historic treatments of the 1923 conference are generally annexed into broader histories of the hill itself or briefly mentioned as a signpost in the emergence of Church pageantry in the mid-to-late twentieth century.7 Moreover, any study of the 1923 centennial celebration should not be separated from the evangelistic “country work” preceding it.8 To 5.

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