Skip to main content

Chloroform in Print


Probably more about Joseph Smith than any "Gentile" would care to know, but Richard Lyman Bushman's biography has garnered mostly favorable reviews, including this one from the New York Times.  Bushman is a Mormon himself, but apparently went to great lengths to write an "unbiased" account of  "The Prophet," setting him within the religious ferment of the time.  After all, America was going through a second "Great Awakening," so it's not surprising Smith was able to quickly find adherents to his unique vision, which Mark Twain called "chloroform in print."

You really do have to wonder at the gullibility of people to swallow such a far-fetched story, replete with golden tablets, which he never produced.  Apparently, it was these golden tablets that sent Thomas Stuart Ferguson on his quest to find the lost tribe of Nephites in the jungles of the Yucatan, eventually setting up the New World Archeological Foundation, which still functions today.  Smith himself had hinted that this may be the place where the famous battle between the Lamanites and Nephites took place, after reading John Lloyd Stephens' Incidents of Travels in Yucatan, published in 1837, and that the long form version of The Book of Mormon might be buried there.  Twenty-five years of fruitless digging (at least as far as any evidence of Nephites is concerned) resulted in a serious crisis of faith for Ferguson, who was forced to admit there was no archeological basis for anything Smith had written in his book.

Yet, there are many Mormons who still hold to Smith's gospel, which he supposedly "translated" from some Egyptian-like hieroglyphs with the help of magic stones, only to bury the golden tablets again as the angel Moroni instructed him to.   You have to hand it to Smith in covering his bases, as any good storyteller does.

Comments

  1. I see they now have seating at Hill Cumorah but it's still free.bosox

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...