In the seminar I quickly learned that B-B was not a fan of Bushman or his work. As I recall, B-B found Bushman's work too middle class, elite class wanna be. As someone born in England class, you see, was never very far from B-B's mind. I don't know whether B-B disliked Bushman for reasons other than class and class wannabeism: the fact that Bushman won a Bancroft Prize and he never did, the fact that Bushman held a distinguished professorship at a prestigious American research university that was a member of the elite Association of American Universities and he didn't, the fact that Bushman took a more social and cultural approach to psychology than his mentor Donald Meyer--whose work I find too reductionism--or the fact that Bushman was a Mormon believer and he was neither. What I do remember is that I thought B-B misinterpreted Bushman's book on American refinement. He saw it as a paean to the middle class and the civilising process. I, on the other hand, thought, still think, and stated in class, that the real heroes of the book were the dirt poor Smith family, the family of Mormon "prophet, seer, and revelator" Joseph Smith Junior. I still think B-B let his ideology get in the way of a valid analysis of Bushman's book. That, of course, has been and continues to be far too common occurence in intellectual and academic circles past and present.
Another thing I remember about B-B's graduate class was that there was a remarkably ignorant and moronic statement made in the class by one of the other graduate students in the seminar. The student, who will remain nameless because I have simply forgotten virtually everything about her, remarked, during one of our classroom discussions, that she found the Mormon sense of persecution irrelevant. I had and still have a number of problems with such a remarkable, not in a good way, jeremiad. First, such etic statements do not take culture seriously while culture, as social theory and social scientific analysis shows and has shown for a century at least, is important if not central to an understanding humans and human groups and, as a consequence, must be taken seriously, very seriously. As Max Weber and Clifford Geertz realised some time ago, you have to, in order to understand human groups and human social movements, go native. You have to go emic, in other words, to grasp the meanings that often motivate and underlie human actions. That this rather obvious methodology hasn't been understood and put into academic practise by one if not more academic wanna bes, not to mention many academics, tells you something about the dismal theoretical and methodological state of the discipline of history. This statement also ignores the fact that the persecution of Mormons was real, very real. Mormons were persecuted, discriminated against, faced mob violence, and even possible "extermination" in Missouri and Illinois. Such a statement ignores the fact that real violence against "others", such as the real violence aimed at Jews and others during the Holocaust, to chose one example, has had and continues to have an immense impact on human individuals and groups particularly on a cultural and ideological level. Just look at the continuing importance of the memory of the Shoah in contemporary Israel and the Jewish community worldwide and the use of the "holocaust" by some in the Jewish community in Israel and the US as a political weapon that Foucault would have found fascinating. The ignorance, moronicity, and arrogance at the heart of such a dismissive statement shows that stupidity and anti-intellectualism are sadly not the monopoly of the populist masses but can also be found in the contemporary academy.
So why did all this spring to mind? Because I recently decided to take another spin through Richard Bushman's biography of the charismatic and patrimonial (in Weberian terms) founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith. Bushman's Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005) tries to walk the thin line between believing history and empirically grounded social scientific analysis if not entirely successfully. When push comes to shove, Bushman generally errs in the direction of a faithful interpretation of Smith's behaviour and actions and early Mormon history making Bushman's book more meaningful and valuable to the Mormon true believer than to the dispassionate social scientific analyst who seeks to understand Smith and early or primitive Mormonism in its broader cultural, economic, political, demographic, and geographic contexts better. Additionally, Bushman's book has a failing far too typical of so much historical work and historical biography of the past and the present; it sometimes becomes an exercise in kitchen sink trivial pursuit.
So what did I, a "gentile", a non-Mormon who spent the 1990s and the early and mid 2000s engaged in the study of Mormonism, learn and relearn from Bushman's biography of Smith. I learned that in what was still pretty much a traditional world, honour, something that was central to the traditional culture of honour at the time and in the past in traditional communities, mattered. Smith was embedded in a world of honour and honour mattered to him. Smith wanted to be respected and accepted in a world where gentility was a sign of status. He wanted others to recognise him as a gentlemen, if a "rough" gentleman. I relearned that Smith, was born into a family that had difficulty escaping poverty in a world that was changing thanks to the spread of merchant capitalism, sought financial security. I relearned that attacks on Smith and on Mormons generally were part and parcel of the vigilante violence that was far too common in 19th century America as attacks on Masonry, Catholics, Shakers, the Oneida Community, and Mormonism show. Needless to say, these vigilante attacks by "true Americans" on "others", whether for political, economic, or cultural reasons, continued into the 20th century and continues in the 21st century, making the study of American ethnocentrism and xenophobia a central part of any dispassionate and critical study of the United States. I relearned that Smith thought of himself as Abraham, as Isaac, as Jacob, as Moses, as the prophets, and as Jesus, and that he saw the Mormons as a figurative Israel made literally into the new Israel. Mormonism, after all, was and is a fascinating mixture of, as Smith perceived them, Tanakh Hebraicism and New Testament Christianity. I relearned that culture, particularly Smith's interpretation of the Bible filtered through the economic, political, and cultural present, was central to the construction of Mormonism and the creation of Mormons.
Given that Bushman's book tries to put the Mormon prophet and Primitive Mormonism into its ancient environment--a context that is problematic for those of us who are not believers--and its 19th century economic, political, cultural, geographical, and demographic ones, I can only recommend Bushman's biography to the Mormon faithful. It is likely to be and remain the standard work on the subject for 21st century believing intellectual Mormons for some time. I was, by the way, very annoyed by one aspect of the book. Bushman's footnotes cite only the last name of an author and a partial title of an author. This becomes a painful experience when one is looking for the footnote references in the bibliography where there are, for example, nine authors with the last name Anderson. Given this my award for the most difficult citation apparatus to manoeuvre through I have ever experienced goes to, moment of silence, Richard Bushman's Joseph Smith.
What a pity that Marvin Hill wasn't able to pursue his biography of Smith...
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