Brodie sensed some difficulty in this argument, for she said in her original edition that early in Joseph's career he "reached an inner equilibrium that permitted him to pursue his career with a highly compensated but nevertheless very real sincerity" (p. 85). She admitted that by 1832 Joseph played his religious role persistently and "did not relax from his role even before his wife" (p. 123). From this point in her work Brodie says little about the rationalizations Joseph would have had to go through where his religious role was imposed upon him. She even fails to mention it again at the time of the martyrdom, perhaps itself an admission that even the early Fawn Brodie saw difficulties in supposing that such a man could go through all the adverse situations Smith was put to and yet maintain his masquerade. By deft phrasing, by saying that early he reached an "equilibrium," Brodie avoided the difficult point of telling us what the nature of his inner reconciliation was.

Thus, at its core, the biography is external only. Brodie was never able to take us inside the mind of the prophet, to understand how he thought and why. A reason for that may be that the sources she would have had to use were Joseph's religious writings, and her Smith was supposed to be irreligious. It is indeed a major weakness of her work that by her very assumptions she cannot get back into Joseph Smith's nineteenth century world, which was so religious in its orientation. She cannot handle the religious mysticism of the man or of the age because there is too much of modern science in her make-up, too much of Sigmund Freud, too much rationalism. For Brodie to believe in the reality of another world, a world of the spirit, seems incredible. Possibly it was because she was a Mormon, proud, in her own way, of her people and their heritage. Faced in the 1930's and 1940's with a general cynicism toward religion among many intellectuals, she may have been anxious to destroy the image of Mormonism that saw it as something to be sneered or laughed at. Such concerns may have caused Brodie to over-stress the prophet's rationality, play down his mysticism, and dismiss his religious thought, which was perhaps embarrassing, as a "patchwork of ideas and rituals."

It may be that Brodie erred initially when she accepted the prevailing view of the 1930's that the American Revolution was a period of indifference or even hostility toward religion, reflected in the attack on the established churches and the resulting separation of church and state. She says that Joseph Smith Sr. "reflected that irreligion which had permeated the Revolution, which had made the federal government completely secular." While a recent scholar terms the Revolutionary era one of religious "desuetude," no one today would call it irreligious. Even the Deists acknowledged the existence of God and a prevailing morality in the universe, holding that, by studying nature, man could learn more about God than from the Scriptures. Theirs was an attack on some traditional Christian views but not on religion. Separation of church and state resulted from a union between the Jeffersonians and the pietistic sects who sought to make religion a matter of choice, not legal necessity. But even Jefferson would agree that religious faith was necessary for the stability of the social order. The Baptists, Presbyterians and Methodists who supported him were intent not upon the destruction of religious influence, but upon making their own sects more influential. There were few Americans at the end of the eighteenth century who could justly be called irreligious. Certainly, we shall see, neither Asael Smith nor Joseph Smith Sr. were among them.

In her supplement Brodie contends that new available sources on Joseph Smith do not demand any major revision of her interpretation (p. xi). I would challenge this. There are in the Church archives hundreds of manuscripts by or about Joseph Smith which Brodie did not see and which are now generally available to scholars. In none that I have examined is there a hint that Smith thought of himself in any other terms except those manifest in his published writings--that he was a man called of God to lead a movement and start a church. When one has read through and noted carefully this vast miscellany of material, it becomes impossible to believe Brodie's original thesis. Joseph Smith played out his role not only before his wife and all his friends every minute of every day, of which we have record, beginning in 1829, but also in the few personal diaries which he wrote himself. In one of these, written in 1832, Joseph records the following:

O may God grant that I may be directed in all my thoughts. O bless thy servant. Amen.

In the morning at 4 o'clock i was awoke by Brother Davis knocking at my door saying: Brother Joseph come get up and see the signs in the heavens, and I arose and beheld to my great joy the stars fall from heaven; yea, they fell like hail stones, a literal fulfillment of the word of God as recorded in the holy scriptures and a sure sign that the coming of Christ is close at hand. O how marvellous are thy works O Lord and I thank thee for thy mercy unto me thy servant. O Lord save me in thy kingdom for Christ sake. Amen.

Seer Stones and Money Digging

What were the evidences of fraud she thought she saw? Setting aside her basic cynicism about religious matters and her contempt of polygamy, her argument rested on several dubious assumptions. First was her acceptance of the validity of the testimony collected by Philastus Hurlbut that before Joseph Smith was a prophet he was an irreligious money digger who used a magic stone to discover buried treasure. Her thesis is that Joseph gradually matured as a prophet, gave up his stone and presumably his belief in magic, and gave himself wholly to acting out the more dignified religious role. There is, of course, a major discrepancy in the argument because Joseph did not give up the stone or cease to believe in its powers even after he had reached the pinnacle of his power in Nauvoo. Brigham Young records that in late December, 1841, Joseph told the Twelve Apostles "that every man who lived on earth was entitled to a seer stone, and should have one, but they are kept from them in consequence of their wickedness, and most of those who do find one make evil use of it." Young added casually, "He showed us his seer stone. "

Her use of Hurlbut's sources must now be seriously questioned. Richard Anderson has shown that very similar or even identical phrases show up repeatedly in the testimony of these witnesses, phrases like "acquainted with the Smith family," or "addicted to vicious habits," which demonstrate Hurlbut's (or E. D. Howe's) heavy hand in the composition of the testimonies. Since we know that Hurlbut went back to Palmyra purposefully to find evidence against Joseph Smith, Anderson's findings confirm what should have been suspected all along, that they were at best highly colored and at worst deliberately misrepresentative accounts. We get some idea of the difference with which a more friendly interviewer could have handled such testimony by comparing the Hurlbut interviews with those of W. H. Kelley. Kelley, a Reorganized Mormon, in 1867 questioned some of the same families as Hurlbut but got some very different responses. The witnesses under Kelley's scrutiny were much less likely to say that they knew a story to be fact, more likely to admit that they had merely heard it. Often they confessed that they had no first hand information. They did not seem to think that Joseph or the Smith family were particularly bad. Kelley's interviewing was not necessarily more impartial than that of Hurlbut. One can find examples of repetitious phrasing in Kelley's testimonies too, but it demonstrates the great influence that a biased interviewer could have. It seems credulous on Brodie's part to believe the statement of Willard Chase (p. 38) that Joseph "told one of my neighbors that he had not got any such book [of plates], nor never had such an one," or Peter Ingersoll that "he told me he had no such book, and believed there never was any such book" (p. 37) when the phrasing is so similar, and when the statement by Chase came from a third unidentified source. It is essentially upon evidence like this that Brodie depends to prove her case of Smith's early cynicism and fraudulent intentions.

There may be little doubt now, as I have indicated elsewhere, that Joseph Smith was brought to trial in 1826 on a charge, not exactly clear, associated with money digging. However, the reports of what was said at that trial are contradictory. One version says that Joseph Smith Sr. and his son "were mortified that this wonderful power [of the younger Smith] which God has so miraculously given . . . should be used only in search of filthy lucre." This points up a major discrepancy in Brodie's interpretation. Her thesis that the prophet grew from necromancer to prophet assumes that the two were mutually exclusive, that if Smith were a money digger he could not have been religiously sincere. This does not necessarily follow. Many believers, active in their churches, were money diggers in New England and western New York in this period. Few contemporaries regard these money diggers as irreligious, only implying so if their religious views seemed too radical. The historian of Middletown, Vermont, Barnes Frisbie, was much closer to the truth when he said that the rodsmen who flourished in Orange County, at Wells, Middletown and Poultney, Vermont at the turn of the nineteenth century were accentuated by religious not monetary motives. They saw themselves as the children of Israel and believed in impending judgments, in the restoration of primitive Christianity and in the healing gifts.

Frisbie's characterization of these rodsmen is substantiated by Ovid Miner, who wrote about them in the Vermont American, May 7, 1828.

About 1800 one or two families in Rutland county, who had been considered respectable, and who had been Baptists, pretended to have been informed by the Almighty that they were the descendants of the Ancient jews, and were, with their connexions, to be put in possession of the land for some miles around; the way for which was to be providentially prepared by the destruction of their fellow townsmen. [They claimed] power to cure disease, and intuitive knowledge of lost or stolen goods, and ability to discover hidden treasures.

The First Vision

Brodie's assumption of a deceitful prophet was supported by her discovery that early Mormons did not relate the first vision story consistently, and, as she maintained in 1945, the earliest version by the prophet was not written until 1838. She has had to revise the argument somewhat since it is now known that the earliest account extant was written in 1832. But there are, undeniably, differences in the several accounts, not all of them minor from the standpoint of Mormon theology. These contradictions, Brodie still insists, add up to deception.

Again, it is difficult to follow the logic of her reasoning; nor is her approach consistent. I cannot tell whether her chief purpose in handling the first vision the way she does is to understand the human being named Joseph Smith or to discredit his theology and thus his Church. It is difficult to tell whether Brodie is the mature historian probing and searching to find the essence of the early movement and Joseph Smith's part in it or a disgruntled ex-Mormon striking back at a "myth" told her in her childhood.

Despite Brodie's observations, there is a basic consistency in the several versions of the first vision. In each of them Joseph maintains that he was disturbed by the many arguments going on around him about religion and the various claims to exclusive truth made by the several denominations. In all but one, the first, he indicates that it was a religious revival which spurred him to inquire of the Lord in prayer. He says in the manuscript of the 1838 version that it had never occurred to him until his vision that all the churches might be wrong. Later perhaps he may have marked this out, for it did not appear in the published account. In the manuscript of 1832 he says he "became convicted of my sins" and began comparing the teachings of the churches with those of the Bible. In the several versions he maintains consistently that after his conversion he had a period of backsliding and that he was again brought back to his mission by another vision, this time of an angel. To focus upon the discrepancies touching the personages of the Godhead in the first vision story, whether one or two personages, is to concentrate on a theological question and to miss its historical significance. The crux of Smith's account, as Mario DePillis has suggested, is his detestation of the confusion which sectarian conflict engendered in his mind. After undergoing a conversion experience, and after other circumstances brought him to the necessity, he began a movement with certain striking characteristics, perhaps the central feature of which was its totality, its anti-pluralistic social and political institutions which excluded all secularism.

By setting up the Kingdom of God Joseph Smith acted upon his central insight, that religious contention was wrong, demoralizing and debilitating of religious faith, and that it was his job to restore the ancient Christian faith that would unite the pure in heart in a community with a prophet at its head--a community where all who would could live in peace and await the millennial reign of Christ. Brodie and others have been preoccupied with the first vision's theological implications which were the product of Joseph Smith's and the Mormon people's later thinking. This has caused them to miss the important implications as to the social and religious origins of Mormonism which may be the essential point. If over the years Joseph's conception of the Godhead changed, this is not evidence of fraud any more than the adaptation of other aspects of his theology in later years proves to be. One has to begin with very rigid, even absolutistic assumptions about his prophetic role before such a claim has consistency.

There has been some doubt whether a revival could have taken place in 1820. Milton Backman and others have provided evidence to show that a revival, indeed many of them, did occur in that "region of country" (to use the Prophet's phrase) around Palmyra in 1819 or 1820. Joseph Smith used the same phrase later in his history to designate the whole area along the Mississippi occupied by the Mormons, including parts of Iowa. Charles G. Finney used it also, to include all of western New York. There is no reason to doubt that it was meant to encompass a large area. There remains the argument of Wesley Walters that the revival must have come in 1823 or 1824 since, according to William Smith, both Reverends Stockton and Lane participated, and they were both in Palmyra only for a few weeks during the 1823-24 revival. It seems likely, however, that William's belated recollections on this point are erroneous. Contrary to Walters, he is the only witness who insists that Lane and Stockton were involved. William was young at the time, from nine to thirteen, depending on the date one chooses for the revival, and according to his own admission, did not pay much attention to religious matters since he had not yet sown his "wild oats." In a much earlier account than the one in question, William said that a "Reverend M----" was the minister who converted Joseph. If William is not clear on this point then we cannot give his unsubstantiated claim about Stockton credence. That Joseph and Oliver Cowdery show some uncertainty about the prophet's age when he had his vision does not prove that he did not have the conversion experience he describes, but only that dates were not so important to him as the experience itself. Had it come, as Walters assumed, in late 1823 or early 1824, right after Alvin's death, it might not have been so difficult to place exactly. If it came earlier, then it may be that Joseph felt some guilt about his backsliding so that it was painful to him to remember how early his conversion actually did occur.

Brodie made much of the point that with Joseph dreams quickly became visions. She quotes Lehi in the Book of Mormon, "behold I have had a dream, or in other words I have seen a vision" as evidence that Smith was given to fantasy and could not always tell the difference between dreams and reality. The question which Brodie fails to consider is whether most Mormons in this period did not in fact equate the two, whether this was not a cultural condition rather than a psychological one. Not having the benefit of Sigmund Freud's analysis of dreams, the early Mormons, like many others of the time, were inclined to think that their dreams had cosmic significance. In the 1832 manuscript Joseph says the coming of the angel caused him to be "exceedingly frightened I supposed it had been a dream or vision but when I considered I knew that it was not." If he were the deceiver Brodie supposes, it is unlikely he would have equated these terms so frankly in his manuscript and in the Book of Mormon. That Joseph believed that dreams or mental images were visions, that he also believed that what he felt intuitively was the voice of the Lord speaking within, was not inconsistent with his background and with the time and place in which he lived. Mario DePillis argues that Mormon visions came during periods of great stress and offered surcease from troublesome doubts. If this proves to be true for other Mormons it may also be true for Joseph Smith and offers an antidote to Brodie's simplistic view that his visions were fraudulent.

The candid way that the Mormon prophet in the Doctrine and Covenants describes the mental effort that went into his own revelations long ago impressed Edward Meyer, a student of early Christianity, that he was no deceiver. The prophet told Oliver Cowdery, who attempted unsuccessfully to translate part of the Book of Mormon:

Behold you have not understood. You have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought, save it was to ask me; but . . . you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it be right, I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you.

But what of Joseph's careful scrutiny and revision of his history from time to time and the frequent changing of his revelations? Brodie assumes that these too are evidences of deliberate deceit (pp. 21, 141, 289). Joseph Smith did manifest the usual human concern for putting himself and his work in the best possible light, but it seems doubtful that on the whole he sought to misrepresent or bury his past. If so, he went about it in strange ways. He never made any effort to destroy the old versions of his history or his revelations, and he kept far too many records if he had any idea that he would deceive his followers or some day fool his biographer. As has already been pointed out, that history is unusually candid at many critical points. Joseph Smith admitted, for example, that he had been a gold digger, but, quite naturally, played down its significance in his early career since the fact was used by his enemies to discredit him. With respect to the revision of his revelations, it may be that like most Americans and most Mormons, Joseph cared much more for the present than he did for the past, that he was more anxious that the revelation express today's inspiration than that his infallibility as a prophet be maintained. Joseph did have some concern for updating his revelations, keeping those parts that were still relevant, revising them where necessary to meet the current situation. He did this with respect to both organizational and doctrinal matters. But this may only suggest that he did not worship his words, that he was confident of the inspiration flowing into him, that he had an urgency to put down his new insights and get them applied in the Church. He did not seem to be overly bothered by the fact that his revelations needed revision. Unless we assume that Smith was something of a fool, which Brodie seems unwilling to maintain, then it is difficult to believe that he was so short sighted that he would revise his revelations and not try to destroy the old ones. It must be that he had other purposes besides deception in mind.

The Witnesses to The Book of Mormon

What of the prophet's story about gold plates, and what about his witnesses? Given Brodie's assumptions, was there not deception here, if not collusion? Brodie maintains that the Prophet exercised some mysterious influence upon the witnesses which caused them to see the plates, thus making Joseph Smith once more the perpetrator of a religious fraud. The evidence is extremely contradictory in this area, but there is a possibility that the three witnesses saw the plates in vision only, for Stephen Burnett in a letter written in 1838, a few weeks after the event, described Martin Harris' testimony to this effect:

When I came to hear Martin Harris state in public that he never saw the plates with his natural eyes only in vision or imagination, neither Oliver nor David . . . the last pedestal gave way, in my view our foundations.