What was Left out of 2nd Class Saints? (Matt Harris 6 of 6)

Gospel Tangents Podcast

Matt Harris told me that only 30% of his research went into his book “2nd Class Saints” due to space restrictions. What was left out? We’ll find out and also get a preview of his upcoming biography of Hugh B Brown. Check out our conversation…

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What Was Left Out?

GT 00:30 I think I’ve only asked you 1/20 of what I wanted to ask. I need to let you go, but the last question that I want to hit you on, I remember we had a conversation one time, and you said that when you write a book, you only put in about 30% of your research. Usually it’s because of page limitations and that sort of a thing. Can you share a story or two of the 70% that’s not in this book?

Matt 01:07 Yeah.

GT 01:09 I mean, I guess the Brown stuff, that’s for your new book. But what are some things that due to space restrictions you just couldn’t get in?

Matt 01:21 Well, just a quick thought, the Brown stuff is in there, his activism and speaking to the press and getting Monroe Fleming ordained or trying to get him ordained, that’s all in there in great detail. But the later stuff in the 1970s…

GT 01:34 Daddy, the recording, I don’t think that was in there.

Matt 01:38 No, no, no. That will be in my Brown biography. And in full disclosure, I found some of this stuff after, later.

GT 01:53 A book is never finished. Right?

Matt 01:58 Oh, my goodness. Well, there are other details that I’ll include about Brown and the ban, in particular, because it’s so pivotal to his story, as is polygamy, weirdly enough. And also, the other story I’ll just start with a teaser, is that Brown was told that he would be an apostle at the age of 15, if he lived righteous enough. He wasn’t called in the Quorum of the Twelve until he was 78 years of age.

GT 02:19 Wow.

Matt 02:20 That is a problem, especially if you’ve been told…

GT 02:24. We could have gotten rid of the ban sooner. Right? If he was only 20…

Matt 02:29. The teaser I’ll give you is it wasn’t the ban that kept him out. It was something else. He was accused of doing something he did not do.

GT 02:36 Did Newell Bringhurst share that story, or maybe you did. Was it with alcohol?

Matt 02:43 Newell wouldn’t have known this. Well, Newell knows it only for me. This is all new stuff that nobody knows about. And I’ve shared it with a few people.

GT 02:47 Was it with the alcohol commission or something?

Matt 02:52 Yeah. Some other time, I’ll tell you more about the details of that. It’s a fascinating thing. He was accused of taking bribes that he didn’t take. But perception can be reality.

GT 03:02. It doesn’t matter when it’s politics.

Matt 03:04 That’s right.

GT 03:04. Accusation is good enough.

Matt 03:05 That’s right, and especially when people’s income is at stake. So there’s a lot of things I didn’t talk about in this book. I couldn’t because of space constraints, but some of it was–I’ll give you a couple of examples. One deals with the activism. I talk a lot about the Church Education System and the BYU religion faculty and CES/Institute people, those who teach the young men and women of the Church, college age. I was shocked at the level of pushback from people who are paid to teach religion to the college-aged kids, how much they opposed the ban.

GT 03:51 Oh wow.

Matt 03:52 And you definitely get that in this book. You see it. I mean, I name some names, just the more high profile people like Lowell Bennion. But because of the length of the book, and they wanted to keep the price down, the press and all of that, I had to cut out a lot of details on that.

GT 04:10. Can we get a sequel?

Matt 04:14. And so I name names. I one of those people I go into, I talk about Hugh Nibley in this book, and he doesn’t agree with the ban. But I go into a lot more detail about Nibley’s views on the ban, that didn’t make it into this book. For example, let me tell you what…

GT 04:31. Can I get–you know, with Lengthen Your Stride, Edward Kimball had that. It’s one of my favorite books, the $150 book, from Benchmark.

Matt 04:41 The working draft.

GT 04:41 Yeah, from Benchmark, yes, because that is incredible. Can you do one of those?

Matt 04:47. Well, they asked me to recently. It’s funny, you say that. The Benchmark people asked me to. But I talk about Hugh Nibley’s views in more detail. Let’s just take a pause for a moment with Nibley. He’s the Church’s apologist. He’s trained at the University of California, at Berkeley. His field is ancient history. He’s written some really big, important articles in the 1950s dealing with the ancient world. Then at some point in his career, in the ‘50s, he turns to Mormon apologetics. He’s trying to put the Book of Mormon in its larger, ancient Near East context. He’s less concerned about linguistics and more concerned about the history, and to a lesser extent, even the theology. Other people will pick up on those strands through the years. John Sorensen, the anthropologist, will try to build on Nibley, in his area of expertise.

GT 05:43. Unfortunately, he just passed away, too.

Matt 05:45. He just passed away in his early 90s. Yeah, so Nibley influenced a lot of people, apologists, but Nibley never believed in the ban. I talk about this in my book, again, for a couple of paragraphs. But in the larger one, I go in to more space. Nibley never believed in the ban. couple things; one is, he taught that God cursed land, not people. Number two, he never believed in this one-drop nonsense. Nibley was an astute reader of history, world languages. You know, he knew that the world was in motion, constant motion that different people from different cultures are mixing and intermarrying and having mixed race children. I mean, the whole race thing is just bogus. He knows this. I might tell your listeners something that Americans in general didn’t know about race construction up until an anthropologist at Columbia University named Franz Boas started writing about it in the early 20^th century. Franz Boas is really pushing back on this idea that race is something that’s fixed, that we’re born black, we’re born white. He’s like, “This is nuts. This is just a construction.” If you look at how race is conceived in the United States in the early 20^th century, if you live in Georgia, you could be classified as 1/16 black. You know, one of your great grand ancestors was black, or 1/32 in North Carolina, or 1/4 in South Carolina. I mean, think about that. They’re trying to figure out who’s black, based on a fraction that lawmakers had sat around a table arguing. It’s possible that you could be considered black in one state and move over to the next state and you’re considered white. And yet they’re creating these racial markers. It’s just driven by racism, that’s all it is. Because if the state identifies you as black, that means you can’t go to the white school. You can’t go to the restaurant that caters to white people. So the stakes are high. This is why you get people crossing below the color line, light skinned people crossing below the color line, identifying as white, when the fact is their great, great grandfather’s black. They’re not going to reveal this. And why would they? They want to be able to vote. They want to be able to go to the best schools, go to the restaurants of their choice.

Matt 08:08 Franz Boas is just puncturing a hole in all of this white supremacy stuff that is really, really strong in the first couple of decades in the 20^th century. This is where lynchings are taking place, all of this stuff. In high schools, American schools, they’re teaching white supremacy everywhere. You look at the textbooks that they offer, and you look at best selling books from the day, that are predicated upon white supremacy. “Immigrants coming to this country,” one of the authors writes, in the 1920s, “they’re going to dilute the white race.” This is what Americans are buying. This is the context in which Joseph Fielding Smith writes his seminal book, The Way to Perfection. This is when the eugenics movement’s really flourishing. This is when Adolf Hitler’s coming to power with his views of race, some of which he learns from Americans, by the way. So white supremacy is just so endemic in the early 20^th century. Protestants and Catholics are preaching all of this stuff from the pulpit. Some are even members of the Ku Klux Klan. So Franz Boas is writing about that this is just a race construction. It’s nuts. It’s wrong. It’s just to justify racism. Nibley reads this stuff. Lowell Bennion reads this stuff. And they tell the brethren, “There’s no such thing as a one drop. This is crazy.” And anyway, so Nibley doesn’t believe in any of this stuff. But if you read some of the things he says in public, he’s a loyal foot soldier. He is not an activist. He’s not Lowell Bennion. He’s not Sterling McMurrin. He’s not putting pressure on the brethren in other words. McMurrin puts pressure from the outside on the brethren. Lowell Bennion puts pressure on the inside. Hugh Brown does both. But Nibley doesn’t put pressure anyway, he just sort of—he says the right thing. He says, “Oh, the ban, I support it.” But in private, he’s criticizing the ban.

GT 10:10 So, in public, he’s supporting it,

Matt 10:11 Yeah.

GT 10:12 In private, he’s criticizing it.

Matt 10:13 Yes and, frankly, I lost a lot of respect for Hugh Nibley when I read his private papers. This is why it’s important, any historians who are listening to this, you’ve got to get into the archives. So, in public, he’s saying things about race, and then in private, he’s saying the exact opposite. He’s just giving his views about things in private that, as far as I know, that he doesn’t share with the apostles. I don’t think that he does. But when he talks about God cursing land, not people, Hugh Nibley finds his voice after the ban’s been lifted. So in 1981, he publishes a book where he talks about God curses land, not people. I’m like, come on, Brother Nibley! Why didn’t you say that before 1978. You could have done the Church some good, but he just wasn’t a controversial person that way. I can’t emphasize enough how controversial the ban was, because the Church was getting intense pressure from a handful of intellectuals within the Church, including the Church Education System, and they were getting hammered by outside groups. And so they didn’t want their own people criticizing them. They were already getting it from the outside.

Matt 11:30. One of the biggest critics was Lowell Bennion, and they ultimately fire him because of his activism. Anyway, your original question was, what did you leave out? I left out a lot of the details. Bennion I didn’t. He’s a big person in the story. I talk about why he gets fired, how he gets fired, and how that hurts him. But there are some lesser people in the Church Education System that I couldn’t talk about, that I go into great detail. They get in trouble with the brethren, and they write private letters to the brethren about the ban. And they’re doing it–they’re on the Church payroll. So let’s be clear, they’re not going rogue, unlike Lowell Bennion, who talked to his students. “The ban’s immoral.” What? You’re going to teach that to your students at the Institute and expect to live and tell about it? But the other ones would push back in private letters, respectfully. Then you get some people who are very independent minded, like George Boyd, who was the brother-in-law to Spencer Kimball, so he felt like he had a little connection and probably protection. But when Ernest Wilkinson’s deputy in the Church Education System, guy named William Barrett, when he told George Boyd, who taught at the University of Southern California Institute, and for a while he taught at the University of Utah, where one of his colleagues was Lowell Bennion. Anyway, Barrett told Boyd that you need to fall in line with the Church’s race teachings. Boyd just laughed in his face, “I don’t take you seriously. ” He said, “I don’t take the brethren seriously on the Negro question, either.”

GT 13:19. Wow.

Matt 13:19. That’s what he said in 1955.

GT 13:21. Wow. That’s like Brown board versus Board of Education.

Matt 13:27. Yes. Well, you think back about this. I can’t imagine any CES person today telling their boss that I don’t take your view on this point of doctrine seriously, nor your boss’s view, ultimately, my boss, the brethren. I mean, it just speaks to the independence that some of these CES people, thought that they had at the time. Boyd, of course, again, he’s got a connection. His brother-in-law is an important apostle. But there are lesser people who didn’t have those connections and when they tried to do what Boyd did, they were pushed out.

GT 14:06. Yeah, I’ll bet.

Matt 14:07. And when Lowell Bennion was–I talk about this in my book, but when Lowell Bennion was pushed out in 1962, Apostle Mark Petersen spoke to the CES people, and he essentially said that if any one of you are opposed to any of our doctrines, this is not a place for you. You’re going to follow the same path as Lowell Bennion.

GT 14:37 Oh, wow, that was quite a threat.

Matt 14:38 He didn’t say Bennion by name. Let’s be clear. Bennion’s name was unmentioned, but this happened a few weeks after the firing. Everybody knew what that meant. Bennion wasn’t the only one who was let go. His colleague, Edgar Lyon was also an opponent of the ban. Lyon, they were both really, really prominent educators. The students loved both Lyon and Bennion for different reasons. They had different teaching styles, but the students loved them. So, what the brethren did was they knew that they couldn’t fire these guys out right. There would be an absolute revolution. So what they did was they decided that they would reassign them, to remove them from the classroom. And that’s just a ruse to fire them.

GT 15:31 Right, you’re on the curriculum committee.

Matt 15:34 Yes, we’re going to put you in the basement of the Church building, in a dark corner with nobody around. And, oh, by the way, we’re going to read everything you write in the manual 19 times with a red pencil. So, that’s what they’re doing. I mean, they’re getting control. They’re clipped and controlled, as it’s been said. So Bennion is so hurt by this, he rejects it. He’s like, “I know what you’re doing. I’m not going to do this.” So, he’s written manuals for them before, let’s be clear. But he does not want to do this, and so he takes a job at the University of Utah.

GT 16:09 Where he’s still beloved.

Matt 16:13 Yes, true. It’s true, he is. You talk to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian at Harvard University, who was one of his students, the late Doug Alder, a friend of mine who’s a Mormon historian [and he is still beloved by them.] He [Bennion] was the president at Dixie State for years, and he was also a professor of history at Utah State for a while. Anyway, Doug Alder was a student of his, of Lowell Bennion’s. The late, great Eugene England was a student of Lowell Bennion. I mean, the list is long. Today’s generation, I’m sad to say, doesn’t know a whole lot about Lowell Bennion. But in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, his influence, at least for college students who went through the University of Utah’s Institute program–well, he was fired by then. But the people who came of age in the Church in the 1960s, 70s and into the 80s, who knew him and his influence, praised him. Let me say a quick word about Bennion. He was an independent thinker enough that he could tell President McKay and others his views on the ban. And obviously he crossed some proprietary lines by telling his students his views. But he said something interesting, Lowell Bennion. I got a hold of his memoirs that are unpublished. They’re in the Church Archives. Again, this is the turkey. Lowell Bennion said in his archives that he was privileged to teach. He was privileged to teach. So this 1976 that he wrote his memoir. He was privileged to teach. And he listed several students. He listed, “I was privileged to teach several General Authorities. Marion Hanks was one of them who was a student and would later become his colleague.” He admired Elder Hanks. I wonder why Hanks was liberal. (Rick chuckling) “I was privileged to teach,” I think it was Neil Maxwell. He mentioned there were two other general authorities, one of whom was Bruce McConkie. And he said, “I was able to influence four of the five general authorities that I taught. I could never, ever influence Elder McConkie. He was too independent.” (Both chuckling) I was having one of those moments where I burst out laughing.

GT 18:41 McConkie went to the University of Utah, too, right?

Matt 18:44 He did, yes, as an undergraduate. Then he went to, I think, Michigan for his law degree. So, Lowell Bennion taught Elder McConkie as a younger man, and even as a 21-year-old guy, he couldn’t get through to him. If anyone knows, just to be clear, it’s not surprising for a couple of reasons. Lowell Bennion was a liberal thinker. One of the things he taught that I appreciate a lot is he came of age in a great flourishing of Protestant theology. He’s reading this stuff. He’s a very open reader. He’s not just reading Church material. What he read from the 20^th century, was that good theology is a theology that brings us together. Good theology is a theology that addresses life’s problems in society, whether it’s racism, poverty… Good theology is one that produces harmony. You can see why he opposes the ban. The ban’s divisive. It doesn’t bring people together. In fact, it causes people to question. That was his view. And he never thought that it was good theology, either, to say, “Hey, look, you may not understand this point in life, but don’t worry. Be patient. God will work it out in the resurrection.” That’s bad theology he would argue. Theology is supposed to make sense for us today, in the here and now, in the present. He was very liberal in that sort of thinking, because this is liberal Protestant theology. That’s what’s influencing this. Elder McConkie was the opposite. He’s getting influenced by his father and then, most particularly, his father-in-law, Joseph Fielding Smith. So you can see why these two men would be polar opposites when it came to theology. But, to Lowell Bennion’s credit, even in private, he never disparaged the brethren, even Joseph Fielding Smith, who was responsible for his purge. It was Elder Smith that was the one leading the Cavalry to get him fired in 1962. Even Elder Smith and Elder McConkie and some of the men with whom he clashed, he always praised them in private. At least he spoke generously of them never, never showed any bitterness. To me, I guess I’ve been impressed by that. He was able to handle his emotions. But in 1962 he wasn’t happy.

GT 21:18 Well, very good. So just a reminder to everybody, I’m giving away a copy. Go to gospeltangents.com/contest.[1] You might win an autographed copy of this book right here. A couple of things. I’ve got two pages of notes, and I asked like, three questions, I think,

Matt 21:39 Uh oh, that means I was long winded.

GT 21:43 Oh no, no, no, I love it.

Did Lee Propose Temple in Brazil?

GT 21:45 But also, check out my previous interviews with Matt. We’ve talked a lot about some of the stuff in the book. Can I just ask one question? You have to give a short answer.

Matt 21:57 Sure.

GT 21:58 On page 204, I read something, and it says–my question that I wrote, because I didn’t quite understand. It says, “Did Lee propose temple in Brazil?”

Matt 22:15. Yes, Harold Lee is the one that conceived of the idea in Brazil. President Kimball used that proposal to convince the brethren to lift the ban.

GT 22:27 That doesn’t make sense. Does it? Because of all the biracial problems? I mean, we’ve talked about that previously. I knew when I talked to you before, that Lee had purchased some property, and at the time you said you didn’t know what the purpose was and that President Kimball came in and said, “We’re going to put a temple here.” But Did Lee have that idea, too?

Matt 22:49 Oh, doubtful.

GT 22:51 Okay,

Matt 22:52 Doubtful.

GT 22:53 That’s what I wanted to make sure. Okay.

Matt 22:55. But the question I would ask if I were to interview Harold Lee, which is not possible, but if I were to interview him, I’d say President Lee, what are you thinking? How would you negotiate this temple with the ban? But that’d be the first question I would ask him. There’s zero evidence that he was remotely considering lifting the ban, even though he knew it was harming the Church.

GT 23:21 But he was going to put a temple in Brazil.

Matt 23:23. He was–they announced a temple. During his brief tenure as president, they announced the they were going to break ground for a temple. That all happens under his successors watch, Kimball. But it was Lee that announced it to the Church, and then Kimball recognized that he could use this temple as leverage to get the brethren to lift the ban. But Lee, I’ve talked about this a lot with different people, about Harold Lee’s views on race and I’ve seen a lot of material, and there’s just no evidence. In fact, there’s evidence in the opposite direction. And I’ll just give you…

GT 23:57 So, this was just a temple for white people in Brazil?

Matt 24:00 Yeah, yeah.

GT 24:02 That seems strange. It’s like putting–we haven’t talked about Nigeria. We haven’t talked about Byron Marchant, Doug Wallace. There are so many things.

Matt 24:12. But see, that’s–

GT 24:12 You’ve got to read this book.

Matt 24:14 But that’s the that’s part of the consistency, right? They thought they could target white populations, and it’s just a fool’s errand. You can’t do that in Brazil. This is a country that has a long history of race mixing and long history of slavery. They thought they could target the white populations. But there’s no way to determine who bears African ancestors simply by looking at somebody. So, Elder Lee, I mean, patriarchal blessings, that’s another story. But how do you give blessings to these folks? You’re supposed to declare lineage,

GT 24:51 Yeah

Matt 24:52 The patriarchs in Brazil were declaring lineage all over the place. They were declaring lineage from Cain and Ham. I mean, those are biblical counter figures, and you’re being told that you’re from the lineage of Cain. Really? That’s not going to make you happy. And then some of them are told that they derive from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That’s hard, because those are temple blessings. Those are covenant lineages. And then, lastly, some of the patriarchs were not giving lineage declarations at all, which is a big taboo, because the purpose of a blessing is to declare one’s lineage.

Matt 25:25. So there’s a lot of issues going on, and Lee knows about this stuff, but he just thought that they could target the white population. President Kimball obviously knew that that’s [impossible.] They know they were ordaining black men to the priesthood or biracial men. They know this. They talk about it, and they hear about it from other people. I’ll just say this, because we’re running out of time. But as the brethren approached the ban in 1978, President Kimball had been working with the brethren to see the wisdom of lifting the ban. And he uses, as I noted, Brazil as one of the factors to do this. He talks about the blessings. We’ve got to get on board with the blessings. And he also says that we know we’re ordaining black men to the priesthood. We’ve been doing this for a long time. Let’s just make it legitimate now.

GT 26:08 Yeah.

Matt 26:09 And so that’s what happens and they lift the ban. And fortunately, people like Elder McConkie, when he hears President Kimball say, “You know, we’ve got this problem in Brazil. What do we do?” Elder McConkie is like, “Hmm, I think we should drop the ban.” “Ah, good point, Elder McConkie. I never thought of that.” And that was President Kimball’s genius leadership, right, making Elder McConkie part of the solution by posing a question to him, “What should we do?” Kimball knows what needs to be done. His remarkable leadership allowed him to finesse these very difficult issues with at least some of the brethren.

GT 26:48 Well, I encourage you all, like I said, I think this is going to be an award winning book. It’s already a best seller. So if you don’t have it, and if you don’t win it, go out and buy it anyway. Buy two, buy three, give them to your friends.

Matt 27:08 Amen. Well said.

GT 27:14. Dr, Matt Harris, I want to thank you so much. I know this could have been an eight-hour interview, but I don’t want to take all your day. But this is, this is just fantastic. I just want to thank you for being here on Gospel Tangents.

Matt 27:29. It was a pleasure. Rick,. This is always lovely to talk to you.

GT 27:32 Thanks.

{End of Part 6}

[1] Contest ended in 2024.

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